YouTube Oddities
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The video: Adult Swim's "Too Many Cooks" skit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8)
Edit: I found a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Di3sxO8zw
The short itself is based on the stereotypical American family sitcom;s opening credits, which would tend to show a character doing something 'representative' of their character, while showing the actor's name on screen that played that character. Without too much spoilers for the video itself, the names popping up is a pretty key aspect of the video itself. It gained a pretty good following in 2014 when it came out, and I guess someone on the YouTube UI team thought it would be a fun addition to add the text style from the video onto the video page itself. I remember being happily surprised the first time I saw it (similarly to the first time I saw someone added the Wadsworth Constant[1] as an actual feature, though that's unfortunately since been removed).
[1] A user on Reddit once posited in 2011 that the first 30% of every YouTube video was a waste, so they would just click to around the 30% mark to skip to the important part. A reply deemed this the "Wadsworth Constant", after the user, and it tumbled from there. Eventually, YouTube had an official feature where if you added ""&wadsworth=1" to a URL, it would start the video 30% in, for any video! I'd used it several times when sending instructional videos to friends who didn't need to see the intros.
I was a little off on the number but I knew it was along those lines.
Thanks.
A piece this artistic deserves a curative touch.
It’s Casper Kelly’s (the creator of Too Many Cooks) first full length feature—a 90 minute horror-comedy film that Adult Swim stealth-released a couple of years ago disguised as an airing of a Christmas fireplace video. It actually has very little to do with Christmas, though a surprising lot to do with Yule logs.
Max also has an Adult Swim series called “Infomercials,” which is where Too Many Cooks originally debuted a decade or two ago.
The series consists of a bunch of other very creative short films in a similar vein that aired very late at night. The TV guide block Adult Swim created for them just said Infomercials, much like what every other basic cable station scheduled after hours, except these were all designed to go off the rails partway through and mess with your head.
Too Many Cooks is the only one with a catchy theme song though!
It's still better than when it was constantly recommending the daily wire.
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
Because that's definitely not a default. I've never seen YouTube recommend one of those in my life.
the real problem is that youtube has decided to just put normal recommendations on the search result page in the place where search results should go. I use the extension 'unhook' with the setting 'Hide Inapt Search Results' to remove that misfeature.
this feature was presumably somebody's baby and I'd really like to read their writeup where they unironically exalt its virtues so I can try to gauge how far up their ass their head is.
Increased engagement by putting content after search box.
Reduced search box to such the number that 99.7% searches still can accomplish successfully.
Significantly reduced DB load.
New incentive for the AI team to keep pacing its algo towards AI-only search.
Please no... Facebook is already doing this in marketplace and it's beyond awful. Like "search for an oscilloscope and get a vibrator" level of awful.
Aside, I find it really disheartening how quickly people on this site of all sites are to conclude "I don't see that, so you're holding it wrong". The most likely explaination is these results are some experimental feature run amok. You should know that companies like Google run all kinds of AB tests on the unwitting public, so one person not seeing something should never be taken as proof that another person is imagining it! This kind of "I'm not seeing it so you must be doing something wrong" comment is effectively gas-lighting when it comes from people who work in or near the industry and should know better.
It's possibly coincidence, of course, but why wouldn't YouTube use the same profile data as everyone else?
Though I've had them come up on facebook too, which is why I'm erring on it being someone more actively engaged coming from my main IP address (home has had the same /29 for the last 10+ years). Unless youtube and facebook are fairly directly sharing information, I thought it more likely that someone has interacted with such content in both places than both algorithms making an obscure link. Of course, it could be that there is a cross-over, and it is a strong enough signal that both sets of data miners have picked up on it.
Edit: too early in the morning and my mind is refusing to switch tracks… Thinking about it, liking certain horror/scifi films is a potential link. Maybe people more heavily into body-horror than I are generally fascinated by real aspects of bodily function too.
It feels accurate. My middle-aged sister definitely does.
I think YouTube has just put me in a gender/age/location bucket and figures other people in the same bucket like that thing.
(But actually, who the fuck is watching this shit.)
Edit: plus if this was history pollution then this gross shit would show up on the home page or else where. It is exclusively in the "you might also like" shit that youtube hides in the search results.
yt will also throw 'random' things into your feed.
Also I have seen just hovering over a video on desktop counting as 'viewed' in my history. So you may have inadvertently 'looked'.
Use the do not recommend feature. That seems to calm it down.
I also have a second account for watching more technical videos and that leaks into my main account suggestions.
Poison YouTube recommendations at the nearest Starbucks! (Actually a marketing hack - encourage followers to log out and watch a channel's YouTube videos on public WiFi.)
YT algo is so messed up and it seems the more they try to shape the content people view, the easier it gets for bad actors to exploit the algo.
Shorts are the absolute worst for it and it's why I mostly stick to my subs page over the home page.
I turn this "feature" off every time I open it, it tells me it has saved that configuration, but that is not the case. like other poster commented, review your view history and delete anything you do not want to see or clear it out entirely. There is also option to "don't recommend channel" ([3x ...] beside the video)
This doesn't exist for search results, only for the feed
If not, it may be worth a try. They seem to do a lot to steer Youtube's recommender away from the more gamy regions of its latent space; for example, something like a year ago I saw recommended such a video, immediately reported it for "violent or repulsive content", and thus far haven't seen another. The same has been true for the occasional weirdo along the stripe of modern Russell Brand.
To be clear, I don't think the report was acted upon by Youtube, but I do think the signal inherent in the action must be accounted for in its recommendation model.
Also to be clear, this is no defense of Youtube. It's pretty trash these days, and even the most innocuous recommendations I get have very little to do with anything I'm actually interested in, but this does seem to keep it from getting the idea I might want to see incels and gore.
For me these "you also might like" sections in search results are 50 woodworking and 50 gross out garbage.
It happens all the time and I got hit with the warts and pimples a few months back, just a counter point, I watch YT daily.
It's mostly shorts where you will see it
Depresses me that this channel has over 100k subscribers...
But I've never been recommended gross-out stuff. I have history enabled because otherwise all I get recommended is videos I've already seen.
One thing I would recommend is disabling autoplay. I found recommendations improved markedly when the only videos I even start watching are ones I decided to. And sometimes with autoplay on I'd pass out in front of the TV and wake up to some wild shit, and get stranger recommendations because of it. But still not getting a bunch of gore or gross stuff.
I've once tuned into my Chromecast to find my tablet had been autoplaying for a week and was in the middle of a long streak of middle-eastern folk music with guys playing the flute and dancing in a tent. Thankfully, the tablet has its own YT account, so my main never gut spammed with the corresponding recommendations.
I am very liberal with the thumbs-down button on anything I don't like. I'm also using YouTube premium, although I doubt that would significantly affect the quality of recs, and the recs were fine before I upgraded.
Maybe that says a lot about the type of person that will actually watch a short?
Like literally, my screen only had pictures of multimeters.
For good measure I repeated the search in my main Youtube account. Same thing.
It's likely some coincidence of my previous viewing history, though how woodworking, small engine repair and distributed systems pointed to grossout videos I have no idea. I've heard of at least a dozen other people that this happens to so far across a wide range of viewing habits.
Lots of sponsored ads, but they are all multimeter-related.
So if YouTube is tracking me across incognito mode, then they aren't doing a very good job there.
No need to be rude about it.
Anyways, for me, I just loathe how the whole site is designed in general. Opening YouTube today on a modern browser is slower than opening it on IE6 back then and the whole site relies on a JavaScript framework even though frontends like Invidious, Piped, and YT2009 (and possibly even more) show that you don't need JavaScript or have to make the entire site rely on it just to view content.
This is true for so many things on computers these days: websites, various software, etc.
For me, enabling more adblock volunteer maintained filters, custom element filters, and parameter removals took it away, at costs of YouTube showing me ever niche-er and increasingly monotonic selections.
Even after doing the "never recommend me this channel" thing it keeps recommending me this Jordan Peterson-type shit about "leftist woke idiots getting owned".
Plus, no matter how many times I tap "Not interested" on the Shorts section every week it's back.
This happened to me a few times. Thankfully, clearing cookies is an easy fix for me since I don't use an account; people who do may have to spend some time sanitizing their view history. I now avoid all content that has even a whiff of content that might be automatically classified as political advocacy. I still watch occasional FW videos, although not the ones where I think he'll discuss firearm laws, and InRange is out because Karl too frequently discusses the law and political landscape w.r.t. online privacy/etc. Since reaching the above conclusion and making these changes, my front page has been clear of anything with even a suggestion of partisan politics. It's all machine and mechanism videos, the way I like it.
(Except for the occasional grossout pimple video in the search results, but that's another story...)
I honestly wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if in the near future we have sociologists who pin the catastrophic political divides we now experience down to, at least in part, the fact that so many massive institutions in our society at this particular moment are finding the absolute most ridiculous people and giving them the largest megaphone in the history of our species to scream into because it makes them money.
The other day I was looking for recipes and I had to see disgusting video thumbnails of faces full of zits interspersed with thumbnails of the food I wanted to cook.
There's a ublock origin filter here that hides suggested videos and other crap from the search results page https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube...
What the hell. It doesn't seems to be autogenerated video.
He used to do that back then too, AFAIK they were absolutely autogenerated.
(throwaway because I don't want him to harass me, he does do that too)
Also he specifically links Au version of Linkedin in his bio.
We allow those sorts of names in the US.
The start has a random intro to seem more human-like and the Question/Answer is basically copypasted and the font/style of delivery is very mediocre (and very distinctly cheap SEA format). The comments are the biggest giveaway though with multiple "Love from Bangladesh"s.
That channel has some hits, they posted a monitor "review" which pulled 20k views and a few dozen comments from real-looking people seemingly unaware the channel is run by a Python script.
And there is a ton of them!
What makes you think its not?
For instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLWJ0spQ5q0 the text is from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62840146/unix-create-mul...
There are several different intros with him talking but he has the same cold sore in every one of them...
Became a member of a channel with spoken content and can’t even lock my phone when playing a member’s only video.
Posts and complaints on this go back years, with zero explanation from Youtube as to why this is, if it’s intentional or a bug, etc.
The same is true on iOS, but using the media center instead of the media notification, in which case it will work.
On Android native apps this isn't really true at all, but you should use a background service to handle playback to avoid getting killed by the OS on low memory situations. This does not work for YouTube on the web, because they simply use the web visibility API to stop you from resuming the video if you try, unless you have premium.
My guess is that the original "YouTube Sponsors" feature (which is now "YouTube Memberships") was built on top of the video rental/purchase system and now it is too hairy / not worth it to fix it in the eyes of the YouTube product managers.
I really wish they'd fix it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-backgro...
...or use NewPipe instead:
(also available with SponsorBlock integration)
^ And that one pops a "confirm channel subscription" pop up - is this an inside joke or bug?
There's a whole underground world of social media account trade for this.
Example: https://youtu.be/z815XfakQCE?t=26
And I confirmed it by rewinding a few times and getting the behaviour to repeat (most if the times)
I use it a lot, it's my primary source of entertainment. Here is a list of issues;
1. Casting disconnects after smartphone has been charging for 1+ hour.
2. Small player window covers playlists.
3. In profile tab of Youtube Android app Watch Later and Liked Videos will randomly switch places.
4. Shorts are the worst thing ever for people who cast a lot.
5. On desktop the "Add to watch later" and "Add to queue" buttons will switch locations depending on where you are in the feed.And after at least 5+ years the newline cursor bug in the comment text fields still exists.
Its a modern thing to have something playing while also maybe scrolling your phone. You can't even view comments or video descriptions without playing the video on the cast device.
Just let me browse and build my playlists or, god forbid, watch two videos at the same time.
On Windows, if you use your the volume keys or the play/pause button on your keyboard during one of these videos, you will receive a media status pop-up in the corner of your screen containing the old channel name along with the video title and thumbnail. I've noticed this with a lot of music videos.
Always wondered why sometimes the pop-up description name was different, didn't think about the channel name having changed.
Most likely this is the list sent by the rights holder.
nice, this one breaks one of my userscripts
>Knowledge Base, at this current time has 1,054,762 videos uploaded.
Randomly GPT generated clickbait titles to 3-5 minute clips form some livestreams. If I was in control of YT such channels would be dropped for violating policy.
But because of greed all the content is spread across many many services, each with their own warty app. What a shame!
Buying / deleting videos / etc?
He has people in his comments accusing him of commenting on their private videos / videos in private playlists.
- 10k subscribers - idiotic comments - "Who is..."/ "Why is... everywhere?" video