Hacker News Reader

Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

The reccomendation system is absolutely dangerous. Just this summer, I watched one video on peppers out of curiousity. By the end of summer I've got multiple different varieties growing, and all the accessories to support them. I'm really enjoying my garden, but it's very unlikely I would have started one without the youtube algorithm. Similarly my doctor reccomended I exercise more, so I started running. Then I googled how to improve, and soon I'm purchasing gear, and trying supplements. The amount of economic activity driven directly from Youtube has to be HUGE.

View on HN

It's sad because I remember being able to find new and interesting creators passively. Now the main page is all corporate BS and the algorithm locks you in. We played a bit of WOW Classic last year and all of a sudden I was just flooded with Asmongold videos and videos of people clipping and replaying Asmongold. It took a day of "never show this again" to make it stop.

As someone who had a bit of a YouTube hobby and is trying to get back into it, I've generally found that the algorithm brings me a larger audience than I would have otherwise. I've published three videos in the last 28 days, and my analytics says I've gotten 5200 views across all my content in that time. I have about a hundred subscribers. Search is still king, but 15% of those views have come from suggested. I've got a 7.8% CTR so it's suggesting it to quite a few people.

Like Facebook now does for "boosting" post shares, I wonder when the YT algorithm will start incorporating pay to win mechanics.

It seems like YouTube has realized that winner-takes-all is bad for the health of the platform, and is trying to grow smaller creators. I suspect they won't do this, because they realize that it ultimately strangles growth. Mr. Beast (for example) is already spending about $4MM/month on making videos; if they allowed this kind of stuff, well... not many people could compete.

We'll see though!

After I made the post I remembered they already do it. Brands can pay to sponsor existing videos that put them in a good light. These recomendations do have an [Ad] tag, but the extra views and impressions are allow to feed into the algorithm which then doesn't have to maintain the [Ad] tag going forward:

https://support.google.com/google-ads/thread/10007177/using-...

Occasionally I will see a "Rising Creator" section on the Explore/Trending page showcasing a single channel. This channel typically has less than 5k subscribers and posts regularly.

What corporate stuff do you have on your main page? Mine is all pretty much filled with content that matches what I watch.

This seems pretty tautological. What you watch will reflect your reccomendations because there is a causal relationship there, unless you never use youtube for discovery. I alledge that what people spend time watching is more heavily shaped by reccomendations than they are aware of.

When you depart from your usual intake, some departures are a lot more powerful than others. Sometimes you watch something new and YouTube spends days pushing similar stuff into your face. Other times you watch something new and only see one or two relevant recommendations mixed into your usual fare. My hypothesis is that YouTube knows that particular topics and particular content are associated with usage patterns that make money for them, and the algorithm is alert to any possibility of pushing users into those patterns.

I'm not who you're replying to, but at least for me, I've found a way of keeping the recommendations on check.

https://i.imgur.com/XIRW4U2.jpeg

When opening videos that are sent to me by others, I always use a private window, so my main account is pretty low "variance".

When I find a creator I like, I do a "fake binge", by queuing all their recent videos and some old ones too and playing them unattended.

I also try to minimize my use of the recommendation sidebar, since it usually shows content related to the current video rather than the more general recommendations of the home page.

When something foreign sneaks its way to my home page, I immediately click "not interested", paying attention to not hover the thumbnail.

Overall, Youtube has got me trained pretty well, but at least I get some nice recommendations out of it, so much so in fact that over half the recommendations I get are usually videos I have already watched (even if Youtube thinks I haven't yet for whatever reason).

Personal experience sharing time. I use YouTube heavily, and even pay for YT Premium.

The other day a little modal appeared on the side of youtube.com desktop saying something like, "Curious for new stuff? Explore content that isn't what you usually watch."

It ended up being sorta like an alternate reality. It was all the topics I usually watch, but with different channels I don't normally see at all. In other words, it was as if all the channels I normally watch don't exist, what else would exist to fill the void.

YouTube premium is the best streaming service. There’s so much content of high quality content that’s relatively niche. I recently stumbled on SummoningSalt’s videos about speed runners and I can’t imagine any other medium that would create incentives for that type of content. Of course you don’t need premium, but no ads is great! I’ve gone on to support people on patreon from YouTube, from cgp grey to stuffmadehere. I can’t imagine finding that kind of content on Hulu, Netflix, et al. It’s possible there are YouTube alternatives as I’m quite old compared to a teenager.

SummoningSalt's material is always reliably great.

What they watch is shaped by recommendations, but I think most are also aware of it. For example, when I want to watch something about basketball I typically go to YouTube and there are recommendations of what to watch. There are probably millions of basketball videos, but YouTube is going to show me a handful based on previous videos I've watched and liked. I'm not surprised to see certain content creators more than others. But at the same time if they did a poor job of recommendation (like Spotify) then I'd probably just go and search through channels that I know I like.

I guess what they call it now is the Explore page which is all Ellen and Tonight Show clips.

The Explore page seems to be globally-curated stuff not based on personal taste, so it seems like the opposite of recommended.

And is that the main page for you? When I open the website or the Android app I get "Home". "Explore" is a separate tab. "Home" is pretty much filled with recommendations from channels I've watched recently, no corporate stuff (excluding ads).

I do see the issue of recommendations being flooded with one topic you've watched recently, but I generally don't have too much of a problem with it. When the recommendations stop being relevant/interesting to me, I tend to shut off YouTube.

yea but its like 100% contend that is corporate... if i want to watch late night talk shows i would do that on my TV.... and most of those videos don't get the most views anyways on YouTube so its basically YouTube promoting corporate media

It's not promoting it - it's showing what other people on YouTube are watching. It's an unbiased look at what other people are interested in.

Home page is the one that's being promoted to you.

> Mine is all pretty much filled with content that matches what I watch.

it should know that I don't want to watch the same things every day over and over relentlessly. There's hardly anything (by topic) I want to watch again the next day, except some news and political commentary which I do watch and it NEVER offers me.

if you try watch any independent news, YouTube will never recommend more of it but will give you MSNBC,CNN etc its bad, years ago the algorithm was very good,it would give you a mix of what your into and new interesting stuff now it seems like its pushing corporate content.

What do you consider "independent news"?

The majority of "independent news" have a highly partisan or highly unreliable tilt (both to the Left and to the Right): https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/

Interestingly enough, most people complain about the opposite: that if you watch some piece of slightly tilted piece of content on YouTube, the recommendation goes wholehog and pushes you towards the same radicalization direction, and so you start by watching someone complaining about Feminist Frequency and before you notice you're getting recommended White Nationalist content.

If anything it's probably good that if you're watching "independent news", that the algorithm tries to moderate you with some mainstream content...

"Moderate" you with some mainstream content? Honestly that sounds like a euphemism for programming or brain washing.

Is de-radicalization itself a form of radicalization?

Anything news related is mostly corporate now when searching. Either it's a mainstream news channel for serious news or one of the checkmarked talk shows for satire.

I’m hitting never show this again on one type of content all the time. There are days where my feed consists of like 33% of that stuff and it happens all the time. I’m at the point where it only recommends me my subscribed channels or the stuff I tell it not to show at all some days too. It’s so frustrating.

I think there are some intersections of interest that make the algorithm hypothesize that you're a certain kind of person. Like if you watch a lot of strength training content, and then you watch one lecture on Heidegger, YouTube is like, oh, we finally figured this guy out, he's a white supremacist or at the very least a gun nut. But if I watch a video about cupcakes, I'll only get a few suggestions about baking, not any associated interests, because cupcakes don't combine with any of my other interests to trigger a stereotype.

I always get those "calming meditation" music videos in recommendations, or "5 Powerful Psalms to Help You Sleep" which is on my homepage right now. Every video is from a different channel named something like "Calming Truth", and I can tell at one glance of the thumbnail that it's one of "those" videos.

I have never, ever watched one, and I always click Not Interested, or Don't Recommend Channel. But they keep on coming. There seems to be an endless supply of them.

That's why I started using multiple accounts, makes it a lot easier to keep the algorithm on topic and not get side tracked just because you searched for a song or game once.

In the end the core problem with the recommendation system is simply that there is only one list of recommendations, which makes it damn near impossible to switch to a different topic unless you start account hopping. The new topic-bar helps a little, but still offers no way to get rid of an unwanted topic completely.

I did this till I started paying for premium then it sucked.

If you use different channels, premium should work for all, right?

I use the family plan for multiple accounts. Might not fit if you actually use it as a family plan, but it's working out for me so far.

„Using multiple accounts“ „Makes it easier“ That may work indeed, but i wouldnt call it easy in any way, or convenient. Instead try to subscribe to as many channels you find interesting as possible. Thats what worked for me in the end getting rid of the clutter that is suggested.

I find subscriptions completely useless when it comes to recommendation, as the recommendations seem to be build up of what I watched in the last week, while my subscriptions have little to no visible impact at all.

There are numerous channels I am subscribe to that I haven't seen in months or years, just because I didn't watch them for a week or two and they fell out of the recommendation cycle.

Freetube allows for this experience without multiple accounts... Or any accounts.

You started playing WoW Classic and it was able to recommend WoW-related videos. It did its job. What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow? That's not recommendation, that's mass surveillance and psychological manipulation.

But on a useful note, maybe YouTube needs to provide a function to see a list of random videos that are unexplored or new.

> What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow?

Actually, I think they kind of are trying to do this (in a sense), if you read the article:

> Our system then compares your viewing habits with those that are similar to you and uses that information to suggest other content you may want to watch. So if you like tennis videos and our system notices that others who like the same tennis videos as you also enjoy jazz videos, you may be recommended jazz videos, even if you’ve never watched a single one before.

This is probably how both I and many of my friends who share interests managed to fall down the same city planning YouTube rabbit hole this summer.

That is true. But the word “next” makes all the difference in the world. If you know what I mean.

I want it to diversify a lot more. There's a lot of room between 'WoW related videos' and 98% of your sidebar is one particular creator (asmon).

It's a matter of degrees...

Imagine if I went to church for the first time in a decade and the next day three monks show up at my door with a cassock and vows.

...that's the YouTube algorithm in my experience. I show a passing interest in one thing so it floods me with every drop of content they have on the subject to the exclusion of things that I have watched every week for years.

There are creators I watch every week or every drop. Somehow the algorithm chooses to not surface their videos regularly and surface 46,123 videos on Terraform because I watched a quick tutorial.

This is not my experience at all. Everything on my page is from independent creators.

YouTube's recommendation system (and googles search engine if you see the comments in the other post today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764) somehow escapes the flak that other systems, such as Facebook news & posts, get but I find it's equally damaging to society.

There seems to exist a downward spiral where content that is prioritized to be attention grabbing over all else gets the most clicks and then drives more content to focus on this. The quality of the content itself seems to be increasingly inconsequential and has fallen off a cliff in the face of click spam.

Anecdotal evidence 1: I used to watch youtube videos for investment ideas and now all of these streamers pump out the same low quality, not very researched content with their face plastered on top with a shocked look on their mug.

Anecdotal evidence 2: My son was shown youtube by one of our nannies (despite my rules on no youtube) and has since become semi-addicted to the most brain dead content of toys being made into knock offs of the reasonable shows he used to watch or some adult man child being a weird clown in public.

Idiocracy will be due to memes as much as genes.

Kara Swisher of The New York Times (previously ReCode) has been absolutely biting in her criticisms of Google generally, Youtube specifically, and other current tech monopolies.

Directly to Susan Wojcicki's face in a live public interview: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zKrQzJgFWdw

(Starting about 1:50 into the interview.)

Also numerous times in her column and podcast (I can chase those down if requested, though they should be prominent).

See "Algorithms Won’t Fix What’s Wrong With YouTube" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/opinion/youtube-algorithm... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20184282)

I came to a similar conundrum and concluded that a split across two Google accounts was necessary to keep youtube subscriptions and recommendations in check. Initially, I wanted to separate betwween personal and work but it has now more or less turned into a generic filter between intelligent and casual topics. Incidentally, political content along with it's secondary and tertiary discourse gets the same treatment with little to no exceptions.

I was recommended a video by some guy who ate $14000 worth of Wagyu steaks super fast...

Guess it had good acting, surely no one in their right mind is that excited to eat 5 kilos of meat with water in 5 minutes or whatever...

Just kinda felt disgusting, why does this have a million views? This guy's channel was all about eating shit fast... Wat

I'd just note some things Youtube doesn't have.

It doesn't have any "the key words I'm interested are" section. It doesn't have any fine grained "show me less like this" or "show me more like that" options.

That all the filters of net (Google, FB, etc) have convinced users that an out-of-their control recommendation system is a triumph of this sort of system. If you just demand the recommendation system be different, you're just asking users be controlled in a different way.

Edit: whenever I mention this, I get "but the users are morons and need to be lead". I'd say instead, users are often unthinking and need to be educated.

> I'd say instead, users are often unthinking and need to be educated.

Oh, is that all?

What? YouTube has both of these features? Are you just using it without logging in?

YouTube has the "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" buttons, as well as upvotes, upvotes, downvotes, and subscriptions.

Downvotes on Youtube do nothing, as the system still counts them as engagement and continues to recommend the videos.

The issue with the "Not interested/Don't recommend channel" is that it's the nuclear option. It does make content go away, but more often than not, what I really want is just to watch something else right now. The content might be perfectly fine and up to my taste, but when Youtube keeps recommending the same stuff again and again, there is no easy way to just reduce that a little without nuking it completely.

As mentioned, downvotes do nothing.

But the main thing missing isn't video-by-video like/dislike.

The thing that's missing is something like a control panel. It would show "these are topics/tags I'm especially interested in", "these are topics/tags I want to avoid entirely", "these are things to show occasionally" "show topics similar to what I'm current watch" or not.

All "but they have that objections" here seem very around "but it does have ways to give the opaque recommender suggestions" - yes, but how the recommender works is still unknown, "magical", opaque and how the suggestions will effect the recommender is also unknown.

I mean, I happen to know the only way the only affect the recommender is to actually remove items from your history. That's pretty klunky. And it makes it impossible to say "give me X but not Y kind of X"

On a more serious side, I searched for a 20s video of a funny gaffe by the President of my country, and immediately my feed was flooded by videos from the local right-populist party's fake news propaganda channel. It's that easy for an unwary person just out to watch a funny video to become exposed to a torrent of bullshit.

Anecdotally (n=1, I know), I watch/listen to a lot of leftist lectures and speeches and my feed does not get inundated with them nearly as much... Really makes you think.

I know for a fact that a sizable portion (if not a majority) of far-right content gets heavily downranked (and in many cases filtered completely from) in the algorithm as "low quality content".

The problem is that the right is much better at producing flashy, low-attention/low-commitment content - the kinds of things that excel in the metrics the algorithm would naively optimize for. Case in point, the lectures you watch are nearly the exact opposite of that popular, easily-digestible content.

Hmm, that makes sense. I actually watch plenty of non-leftist lectures and speeches too (keeping my mind open, you know), and neither those start flooding my feed x) I guess the problem lies in the metrics the algorithm is optimising for.

I watched "Triumph of will" once. The youtube started to push on me nazi apologists, holocaust did not happen conspiracy theorists and what not. And for some reason, gaming videos. It was seriously disturbing. I watched that movie because I read about it in a book.

Now they removed movie and left there only very bad unwatchable commentary of it. Let's pretend it solves the problem.

> I watched one video on peppers out of curiousity.

I watched one video on preppers out of curiousity - and my feed is now full of videos about machine guns, shot guns and the correct military gear to pretend you are in the army.

I have the same problem. We watched the videos about those 13 Thai kids that were stuck in a cave. Since then, YouTube has assumed that I'm into cave diving and mountclimbing, so my feed has filled up with videos of related topics. I've never cave dived, never will, and mountain climbing makes my palms sweaty.

But all of that pales in comparison to their Tik-Tok clone attempt of short videos. Talk about "chum"! They're clearly highly optimised to pull people in and get them hooked.

Luckily, I know digital drugs when I see them. I was one of those freaky people that could recognise the "hooks" in games like World of Warcraft and simply stop playing before the "endgame" mechanics sucked your life down the drain just so that Blizzard can get their recurring revenue.

Seems like this data driven optimisation for addicting people to low-quality content is the mental opiod epidemic of the current era...

Running is a hobby that feels like it should be cheap but gets surprisingly expensive. Two quick pieces of advice to save you from a bit of hurt. 1. Track your miles, shoes need to be replaced every 300-500 and 2. Go get a foot orthotic and gait assessment done. Wearing the right type of shoes and finding out if you require orthotics is a easy way to prevent injuries that won't pop up for another year or two down the line.

I know quite a few casual runners (5K to 10K) and been running for over 15 years myself. Other than a $120 pair of running shoes every year or two, what is the expense? Maybe the water backpack things if you are into extreme running?

It is not even a separate expense for me, as I just use my running shoes as my regular shoes. Also, maybe it is my gait or my lack of weight, but I estimate my shoes last 1k miles.

I suppose things aren't as expensive if you are a casual but I'm still surprised you can get 1k out of a pair of shoes. My mother also runs and is significantly lighter than myself and she gets shin splints if she doesn't change runners out at 500 miles. My current system is to run a pair of shoes for about 350 - 450 miles then downgrade them to a pair of walking shoes in till they fall apart.

I started running fairly casually but eventually started doing marathons. I run about 110 miles a month so I'm switching out shoes every 3 months. My feet suck so I'm also replacing a pair of orthotics every 2 years. I got a full set of summer and winter running gear and enough of each to last me a week. I also have a hydration vest, a GPS watch (not necessary but very useful), a set of Aftershokz bone conductive headphones so that I can listen to music while maintaining situational awareness, a pair of good sunglasses specifically for running (I sweat a lot and would not want to ware the same pair for everyday use), I have a few soft flasks that go in my hydration vest, and I've had to invest in a pretty decent treadmill to run on during the worst parts of winter.

Not everything I've listed is 100% necessary but as with most hobbies it finds ways to become expensive the more dedicated you are to it.

Yes, that sounds like it would add up! I feel like I would dissuade myself from going on a run if I had to get all that stuff ready. Even putting sunscreen on sometimes feels like a bummer.

The truth is that you don't. All that's required for almost any training run is a pair of shoes[*]. Everything else is an extra; it's up to you to decide whether each of those extras is worth carrying.

[*] That's true where I live (northern Europe) for pretty much all of my runs up to ~20km. In hotter or sunnier climates it may be necessary to carry water for shorter runs and/or put on sunscreen.

Sunscreen can measurably lower skin cancer risks even in cloudy weather.

It is recommended anytime you are outside when the sun is out.

How do you like the conductive headphones for that purpose? I have been considering doing the same for when I go on walks at night.

I like them but for me the biggest advantage is they don't funnel sweat into my ears, at night when I walk I still prefer my regular earbud headphones. The sound quality with bone conductive noticeably worse, and sadly they stopped making the cheaper wired version that I started with so then getting a pair to try out is expensive now.

The same thing happened to me with plants. I knew nothing about plants last year. Now I tell people I was radicalized by youtube into a house plant and pepper plant obsession.

All it means that it is working as intended. Few years ago YT switched to life-time-value optimization. But when you get it to the logical end, ideal consumer for Google is a healthy person with disposable income that spends all of it.

Since Google/YT essentially are shaping you thoughts and behaviours, logical optimization for them is to shape you to be a working sportsman that spends all disposable income on services, experiences and goods bought online.

It's a consumption-driven economy, where those who are economically useless are driven out of the game.

this is the best one-liner here all week +++

me: art, philosophy, religion, culture -- avidly

me on youTube: Rizin/UFC re-runs, live concerts of commercially successful bands, D&D themed games

Yes, few people realize it but fixing Google's algorithms could be the best thing that ever happened to the climate, and the worst thing that ever happened to our economy (depending on how you look at it).

Because why would you do things for free, when you can pay for them?

I'd recommend anyone looking to take better control of their habits in this regard to install the DF Youtube extension. Turn it off when you want to tumble down rabbitholes and keep it on at all other times. Really makes a difference in how youtube usage works over time.

On a related note it would be interesting if someone has made some "rabbithole resolving" software - I've noticed that these things terminate in extremely similar ways for most people, and have had a number of conversations laughing with others about how we've gone down the exact same content route. Write some code to find the bottom for us and save all the headache (fun)!

I'm wondering what you mean by "dangerous" and what level of irony you're at. :-)

No irony, it’s dangerous. Wait until you get into woodworking youtube … you might be missing parts of your fingers, and you’ll definitely be missing most of your wallet.

I don’t know, blaming YouTube for that is kind of weird?

Also your original examples seem more positive. If more people started exercising and gardening because of YouTube, I think that would be amazing.

Huh, not YouTube but the companies paying content creators to make videos featuring their product.

I got in the same situation with videos on otters (popular in South Korea, it seems) by watching accidentally one in the feed, but the music recommendations are either missing or missing my preferences, so the system does not really work for me.

I can totally relate to this myself. My father also recently just purchased a small sawmill which I think Youtube had a not so insignificant role in...

you know things are getting stupid when you have to stop and think about whether you should open a youtube video in incognito mode or not

“Gear” is slang for steroids so I assume this is the joke, right? :p

Read it as “video on preppers” and everything still worked for the most part, but you didn’t mention freeze dried food or holsters so figured I read something wrong.

Same here, though I caught on at "multiple different varieties [of preppers?] growing" (WTF?).

Weird. If I watch a music video I get recommendations to watch crackpots challenging vaccines or claiming that Nancy Pelosi is passing Sharia Law. Maybe I should watch more supplements videos, that seems to be the sell from the recommended videos.

I very much avoid YouTube across the board because this is so consistent.

What makes you share such an unrelated anecdotal story here?

Seriously? Is it 'telling 'cute' stories to distract from the black box youtube algorithm that creates white supremacists' -time? It comes across as incredibly unempathetic, gaslighty and dismissive, posting on a thread that is discussing an important societal problem; especially using the word 'dangerous' in the sarcastic way in which you used it here.

It's frustrating that the readers themselves have to replace YouTube's cryptic and doublespeak-y 'borderline' label in this article with the word 'white supremacist' and/or 'alt-right' to get the real picture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com