Comment by loudandskittish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by loudandskittish | Hacker News Reader

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loudandskittish

> Instagram actively hides pics from my step kids, nephew and niece to show me "reels" from people I don't follow.

I find it all that for all the data these companies have, they don't seem to be using it well...or stopped using it.

Facebook has suddenly started flooding me with posts from political meme groups I never joined and have never even looked at.

Twitch's recommended section used to be spot-on. Now they're trying to push me to watch women in hot tubs for some reason.

For me, YouTube is the only one that still manages to surface things I actually want to watch.

I don't know what changed (I've really only noticed this in the past two months), but this is starting to feel like the old broadcast TV model of executives deciding we should all watch the same thing.

Twitch has a situation where they are trying to improve discoverability of underperforming streamers. The directory used to just be sorted by live concurrent viewers, which I guess does do a lot to ensure that the front page is full of streams that people will watch (by virtue of them already being watched) but it also leads to the site being dominated by a very small group of people.

Youtube does very well but it's a lot easier to categorize and tag 10-minute videos than it is to do so to a currently active livestream... and I will point out that discovering livestreams on youtube is abysmal. I've got one person that I follow pretty closely and if they arent super good about setting up the stream beforehand it is real easy to miss because youtube will make zero effort in informing you.

But the thing is, a year ago, Twitch actually did a good job suggesting people with only six viewers. *Now* for some reason, they're pushing people in hot tubs who already have thousands of viewers. That's what I'm complaining about.

> I find it all that for all the data these companies have, they don't seem to be using it well...or stopped using it.

They've stopped using it to serve their users. They use it to serve their customers. The content they show you is what they want you to see so they can sell to advertisers, not what you want to see.

these changes are all driven by a/b testing and watching user average watchtime increase.

this stuff is appealing to most people. they measured it. it's how they make money

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