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> For instance, my IP changes when I travel, but I’m an American who speaks English, and yet YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries, despite having my home address (verified with my credit card no less!!!) That’s just laughable.

I bet those advertisers that are wasting money on ads that you don't understand aren't laughing

For years YouTubes top hero banner purposely loaded quite a bit later than the rest of the page.

I never noticed it, until I moved to Spain for a while. Our place had slow internet, and I watched my roommates hit the ad multiple times a day on accident because it loaded right into where the search box was exactly as you’d naturally click there.

I have seen that kind of thing a few different places and I just plain decline to believe that it isn't done with knowledge.

Active items that are already clickable that change location as a page loads drive me nuts, but these particularly convenient examples add another dimension to that.

My banking app does that when doing a transfer, i.e new field appear depending on a receiver. It catches me off-guard every single time. Infuriating.

hah! 2 seconds later this is in my feed

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33765399

If it makes money, it was intentional

It might not be done with malice aforethought, so much as wilful ignorance; blind pursuit of metrics combined with a lack of any incentive to challenge the assumption that all clicks are intentional.

Just hit the / and go straight to the search bar (on a pc)

They only pay per click, so it may not be wasted money if these "wasted ads" have a low enough click through rate.

>For instance, my IP changes when I travel, but I’m an American who speaks English, and yet YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries, despite having my home address (verified with my credit card no less!!!) That’s just laughable.

Funny, my experience with YouTube is the opposite. I'm Italian, but I've emigrated a decade ago. I've tried to purge my Google account of all traces of Italian, changed my languages in my Google profile, settings, and all the places I could find. Google also has my credit card through Google Pay.

And yet they keep switching my YouTube interface to Italian at least once a week. I set it back to English every time but within days it's back.

The Italian interface is perfectly fine, mind you, but they insist on auto-translating the titles of English videos, which a) often results in barely coherent titles and b) the videos are still in English!

Have you checked what Accept-Language header you're sending? Eg on http://myhttpheader.com/

Mine is Firefox default "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5" yet google maps and search turned into French when I was in Luxembourg just for couple of days. Luckily they don't turn to ruscish any more when I'm in baltics.

My youtube ads are the same 2-3 casino/sports betting things over and over again. Tho I never have nor never will partake in any of those nor have I ever clicked on one, so it is just unbelievably stupid.

That's really weird then. I'm often in Thailand and Google's never tried to change my interface language, though it does keep suggesting videos in Thai.

I’ve heard en-US is often considered as a default value and thus to be ignored when deciding user language. Set it to any other en-* value and chances are that it will override local indicators such as country IP.

I think the mistake here is that google is making recommendations for the users. Google is making recommendations for google, to drive the users' attention to what benefits it most.

Bingo. I am a full-time YouTuber. I hate this reality.

Most people don’t understand the degree to which advertiser preferences dictate what they see on YouTube.

Creators are incentivized to only publish content that meets YouTube’s “advertiser-friendly guidelines.” When we publish content that is not suitable for all advertisers, YouTube doesn’t promote it, which is a death sentence for the video. YouTube claims that a video’s monetization status has no impact on discovery, but according to YouTube, all of the factors that influence whether a video is monetized directly impact video discovery. It’s smoke and mirrors.

An overwhelming majority of views on YouTube come from recommendations and suggested videos, and YouTube has little incentive to suggest or recommend content that is ‘unsuitable’ for advertisers. Because it doesn’t make them money.

To put some numbers on that, ~95% of my views come from YouTube’s suggestions and recommendations. I have millions of subscribers, but subscriber count is all-but meaningless. For any given video, subscriber notifications typically account for a negligible number of views, usually less than 5,000.

Remember when YouTube introduced the bell you have to ‘ring’ in order to receive notifications from the channels you subscribe to? That is one of many actions YouTube has taken to remove your ability to choose what you see. YouTube does this because people don’t decide what to watch based on whether or not it’s advertiser-friendly. They would rather decide for you.

I publish news. And there are highly-newsworthy stories that I haven’t covered because of the above. I hate it.

> So the issue is that it has tons of extra data than they need because it * doesn’t make their recommendation any better. ...YouTube is incredibly simplistic in its recommendations. I find it very hard to believe that they couldn’t achieve the same quality with much less info on me.

An example of YouTube insanity is their video quality settings. There is no clear manual setting (which should be labeled as such), to keep them at only a specific video resolution at all times (until adjusted by the user). Instead, users have to constantly battle with YouTube auto and resizing, to include when going to and from full screen, or make their own custom workaround.

> For instance, my IP changes when I travel... YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries...

The point is not the convenience of the user, but rather maximum data extraction from users and selling that data to 3rd parties (including governments). This is why users should not blink in finding workarounds for what Google is doing. Users should have no more concern or loyalty to Google, as they have for them, which is zero outside of how much money they can make.

The possibilities of having a truly open-source YouTube client is that users can configure their settings to exactly as they wish, without tracking and massive privacy violations.

> For instance, my IP changes when I travel, but I’m an American who speaks English, and yet YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries

I have no direct access to confirm this, but I have a theory as to why it happens. It’s a combination of greed and various ad buying semi-broken options.

1. Google shows ads which earn them the most money. “Relevance” only plays out in the mapping phase of finding advertisers who are willing to show their ad to your target group. The reducing phase is essentially just sorting by bid and selecting the top ones.

2. For many English speaking ad buys, I’ll bet there is an option that was checked to restrict which countries it’s shown too for the highest bids (maybe they have a separate campaign for RoW with a low bid, but doubtful). Advertisers have learned about ad fraud at least to some degree, so checking this box seems good to them.

3. Local advertisers in X foreign country aren’t given an option for “exclude English speakers here on holiday” and even if they did, some won’t click it and so there will still be some low bidding ad to fill the slot.

If it was about real relevancy to you and not “who will pay the most given this bucket of basic attributes”, folks like me would probably hate advertising less. The problem is it’s not and in a capitalist world I’m not sure it’ll ever change.

The same holds true for product recommendations, it’s my personal belief that on say Amazon, if a product is recommended for me, it’s because either the seller paid for the recommendation or it’s the highest margin item that fits my vagueish buying patterns. It’s not about real relevance there either, it’s “you brushed into this weird vẹn diagram overlap” and “now we can make money showing it to you.”

I think you nailed it - especially your 4th point: "If it was about real relevancy to you and not “who will pay the most given this bucket of basic attributes”, folks like me would probably hate advertising less."

>I’m an American who speaks English, and yet YouTube insists in showing me local ads

The number of travelers in foreign countries are so low compared to local population that I don't think it even makes sense for Google to optimize ads for people like that

> Google has tons of information on you

Do you have any good sources about this? what do we know for sure Google know and track about us? I work for Google now, but speak for myself here. In my time here (not much, less than a year still) I've seen a huge focus on privacy and not storing user data. Then again, I don't work on ads. However, even before working at Google I was surprised that given my liberal sharing of information on the internet, ad targeting did not seem particularly more informed for me than "middle aged male living in Canada" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

> what do we know for sure Google know and track about us?

For start, your entire search history. After you search, Google tracks how much time you spend on those sites with AdSense. Google reads our emails to scan for flights and to add appointments to calendar. It knows the places we go because Google Maps and the videos we watch online.

Google has plenty data to make an accurate profile of you, and you can see it’s inferences on your relationship status, income, employer and so on in your Google account[1]. (IIRC it was more complete some years ago, now it’s showing less categories or there’s another link I can’t find.)

[1]: https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155964...

That they are not able to target you and others with ads worries me. I'm asking myself what are they doing with all this data they gather on people?

Regarding your point working at google, I don't think the entirety of google is evil. There have to be good people somewhere. But some parts are just evil.

> Do you have any good sources about this?

For example, documents in Google court cases: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1592380225064960002 and https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1592551401875734528 and https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21403202/google-engineers... and possibly others

The interesting thing about the Verge article, which comes across as being part of a pattern, is the deception and obfuscation around data collection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

> NSA databank, with its years of collected communications, allows analysts to search that database and listen "to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."

> Do you have any good sources about this? what do we know for sure Google know and track about us?

The list of Google handing tons of user data to governments or 3rd parties goes on and on. Clearly there is a lot for them to be handing over. Don't understand the surprise or confusion over what Google does.

...Access to Sci-Hub Founder’s Google Account Data (https://torrentfreak.com/fbi-gains-access-to-sci-hub-founder...).

Google handed over user data to the Hong Kong government (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-handed-ove...).

Google Hands Over User Data For 94%... (https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/06/27/google...).

Google Bypasses Privacy, Puts Users’ Data on the Map (https://analyticsindiamag.com/google-bypasses-privacy-puts-u...).

Google’s ‘deceptive’ account sign-up process... (https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/29/google-account-gdpr-compla...).