On a similar note, I've started noticing the third video in the "related videos" section on the right-hand sidebar is usually a new video with _extremely_ clickbait and inflammatory titles - sometimes with little connection to the topics I usually watch.
They're extremely distracting so I've set up a uBlock filter for these: `www.youtube.com##ytd-compact-video-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(3)`
This doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's good enough. (in particular, it fails if what I'm watching is a trailer video which makes the 2nd recommendation in the sidebar be a movie recommendation which doesn't fit this rule; as a result it blocks the 4th entry in the list, but oh well)
well just watch... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG1NeA3WoKc
I sometimes wonder if the opposite is true - that the PMs can convince the upper managment that users are staying on the website longer with all those stupid as fuck shit changes, but in reality they are there longer because it's increasingly more difficult to find anything you are looking for
Sort of 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure'
This mind trick is called the Gruen transfer.
...and it probably does in the short term, as you just try to engage more with the software trying ever harder to find what you want. But probably also kills engagement in the long term. Personal experience with this: Facebook post-2020 vs Facebook pre-2015.
Facebook pre-2015 was so magical as I was finally reconnecting with long-lost school friends and childhood neighbors we long lost touch with (pre-email friends.)
Facebook post-2020 is me engaging desperately to see something other than the same 10 repeated posts per day...knowing full well that the magic is still in there, just not visible by default. And then one day I just stopped checking.
But yeah anyway, do you still know people who actually post on Facebook?
I don’t think any other social media came close to how purely good Facebook was in its golden years. I’d love for someone to write a book on how it declined.
Never got there. After a brief detour in some Greek channels I can't comment on, I ended up in a seemingly endless loop of mindfully woke TEDx talks (as in, no political or inflammatory stuff, just different variations of "how to live your life to the fullest", "this is how your brain works", "the secret to to happiness/productivity/communication...", etc.
Logged in:
Watching RedLetterMedia video, get recommended a clickbaity video about comic books: https://postimg.cc/QVkc7QwQ
Watching Colombo snippets, get recommended some celeb Net Worth trashy video: https://postimg.cc/grRNTL5j
Climate Town links to some unrelated video about Orlando amusement parks: https://postimg.cc/jW0zNMxh
These are way milder than I remember, btw.
Logged out, no weird recommendations:
So yeah, logged out doesn't have that 3rd obnoxious video, which is kind of interesting.
A number of YT'ers I follow have mentioned this is basically required now for any sort of rankings.
Something similar happens on Twitter when you search for something in the "Top" tab. It doesn't show you results with your search terms. Instead, it shows something peripherally related to what you searched, but much more popular and engaging.
Search has become one of the most dysfunctional features in Google products. I am extremely annoyed that I am paying for YouTube Premium, I might just pull the plug and install a network-wide ad blocker system so I can vote with my wallet.
God, I hate modern Google.
Youtube is starting to become more like television, or Netflix.
On YouTube, you get thrown in a trash bin unless you're able to pay or generate traffic from popularity elsewhere.
YT also puts too much emphasis on post titles now, many posters outright clone titles, which in turn botches search results massively. It was a terrible decision YT made to deprioritize taxonomy (hash tags) years ago in order to reduce moderation staff-- Of which, if taxonomy actually worked, feedback could better identify inaccurate and mis-leading content when compared to thumbs down rates... The options for video result sorting have been terribly limited and almost useless as well for ages now.
A big conflict of interest is that YouTube sells and promotes ad-based content boosting to creators, which contradicting-ly makes them more geared towards promoting content that falls under this (paid promotional) category first. It also drives YouTube to lower organic reach for users to drive them towards paying for promotion more year over year... That also encourages the platform to subvert organically good/upvoted content. YT can't logically sell the idea that organic growth is a possibility any more citing the underlying fact that they feature paid promotion without labeling every promoted item of that content as such, it's shocking how they get away with this contradiction of authenticity regularly.
The older engagement methods were far better for YouTube's content quality and authenticity. Now too many users are driven to post repetitive and dragged out videos, with titles based on trends, with decreasing originality and substance.
The current YouTube/TikTok success model is training everyone to conform to a single theme and format, encouraging idea, topic, and content cloning, and into repeating and simply reacting to what popular channels do.
YouTube content will all only continue to get worse and more monotonous if the same ideals on paid promotion continue, and creator success/profit will continue to shrink. (Just my opinion of course).
I've been flagging these things as "not interested" for months now, but it feels like fighting windmills because it has no discernible effect. The effect of all of this is that YouTube is a lot less useful to me than it used to be.
I don’t know what they’re optimizing for but it certainly isn’t my enjoyment.
Gross.
I had to install an extension to get it to stop because "Not Interested" and "Don't Recommend Channel" don't work in search results, even though they are turning search results into just another front page :/
I basically use YouTube only without logging in, and rely a lot on the front page for my current interests (channels I want to remember long-term go in my RSS reader). It seems like YouTube always has a channel or two it insists on pushing repeatedly no matter how often I ignore their videos.
Too interesting, too holy shit wow can't believe that, wow. Like sometimes an EE thing yes, then it makes sense, basically a guy talking about an oscilloscope or television then it's part of the show to use a television to talk about it. And only when they link to it externally.
But interesting for its own sake? Rather talk to the men on the street, those guys are interesting, have great stories.
They might have a minus sign somewhere it shouldn't be.
Would be nice for us to have a little more control and transparency over where the AI is taking us, though, specially for us YouTube Premium payers.
-Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
youtube.com###hover-overlays
youtube.com##yt-icon.ytd-badge-supported-renderer
youtube.com###related
youtube.com###donation-shelfSearching for an 'unperson' will always return zero results nowadays. Edit: I guess that is just for Facebook now but my point stands. The results for certain searches are manipulated manually whether easily noticeable or not.
This. There's a lot youtubers from my country who has crap content presented in a cringey way.
Like, if I search for "second order vibrations in internal combustion engine", I get hundreds of people explaining it in local languages I don't even speak, in a way that's targeted at college students cramming for finals (think equations on a notepad without explaining what physically goes on).
Makes me wanna leave this place. That would be funny, isn't it? Emigrating because local YouTube content is cringe.
(I turned off all tracking things that can be turned off from their UI, but I suppose they can still figure out where I'm from unless I use a VPN).
Feels like they really want you to subscribe and engage with the "related" videos instead of the real deal, which sucks for channel owners, especially if it's channels who profit on being weirdly intrusive and hostile towards said channels or people.
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/For you/)
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/New for you/)
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/People also watched/)
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/Previously watched/)
youtube.com##ytd-horizontal-card-list-renderer:has-text(/People also search for/)Might be related to some local law or simply pressure from lawmakers, eg Canada is experimenting with such a law: https://www.medianama.com/2022/06/223-canada-bill-streaming-...
Google in general is annoyingly insistent in localizing results. It used to be that google.com gave you english results and you would go to google.ccTLD to get a local experience. Then they changed it to google.com being localized by default (even though my browser is set to english) but you could click a link to go back to the english version from the home page. Now they even hide that link when you go the the home page via the google logo (why????) and you have to explicitly go to google.com/ without a hl query parameter. And of course the english results are still localized somewhat (e.g. it'll show the local Wikipedia anlong with the english one, even for articles that have fuck all to do with location).
(I seeming can't completely disable that annoying "feature")
When people use highly complex graphical browsers and Javascript to make these requests it is sometimes triggered by a "button" at the bottom of a page called "more results" or something similar. Alternatively the requests may be triggered automatically when down scrolling, producing what some people call an "inifinite scroll" effect. Javascript is usually what produces the annoyances people experience. It is also used for tracking and telemetry.
The token for the public API to retrieve the next batch of results is the results file. Using a simpler HTTP client, I can (a) search YouTube very quickly and comprehensively entirely from the command line, (b) download videos without ever visiting a YouTube page in a graphical browser and being exposed to annoyances, tracking and telemetry (c) switch from retrieving via search string to retrieving via channel name, (d) mix the search and channel results into a single results file, (e) output a TSV table from the results file. Currently I include the following fields in the TSV table:
YouTubeID Title ChannelName Duration SearchString/ChannelPath Search/Channel
The last field is just an indicator of whether the result is from a search or a channel.
Videos are browsed and selected using a TSV table instead of an HTML search results page.^1 Because I am interested in videos of a certain duration, including "unpopular" videos with low view counts, I have found this is an optimal search method. No distractions. YouTube wants people to view popular, low quality, "viral" videos, e.g., "fake news", extremism and the like, because this "content" is optimal for their advertising business model. Hence automatic "recommendations". This is what makes YouTube search so horrible. Advertising as a "business model" for websites can influence design and have very harmful downstream effects.
1. The HTML pages for videos are where the "recommendations" come from. Thus I never see the recommendations as they are not part of this search/retrieval method. I could extract them from the HTML into a table if I wanted to see them, but I choose not to. I only extract the video download URLs from the pages for the videos.
This, but with LinkedIn and jobs
- [ ] ENH,SCH: https://schema.org/MediaObject and search cards
- [ ] UBY: search: transcript search snippets