One UX researcher ignited changes to how the company (YouTube) built product

This seems like a rather biased and rosy view of what I'd consider almost a dark pattern... using personalized recommendations to artificially drive engagement numbers and ad views, at the expense of user agency.

For example, the finding that users primarily went to the home page to search led not to better searching but to distracting them with algorithmic suggestions on the home page instead.

Like with most things Google, YouTube users aren't users, but products :/

Meanwhile the signals that I purposely provide, like my likes. dislikes, and subscriptions, are downplayed. I wish I could get a clutter free home screen with just a big search bar and my latest subs, but no...

Oh, so it's their fault YouTube is a disorienting, addiction-driving hellscape now. Good to be able to put a name to it.

>The homepage showed a bunch of videos that were driven by a mass algorithm (and was pretty much the same experience whether a person was logged in or not).

This was good. Your experience was grounded. Same thing with every video showing the same recommendations for at least a few weeks at a time. The idea that UIs need to be constantly shuffling content so that you can't tell which way is up as you navigate and will therefore submit more fully to The Algo is poisonous.

I like the scientific approach to research but its pretty obvious they werent trying to optimise anything for the user. Its like reading an interesting account of someone inventing a better version of a nerve gas.

Looks like the tweet version of Sammy the Bull Gravano's podcast.

All I see is "personalized recommendations", "experience" and Ad $$ in the post, but that's exactly it. Someone has to work at the slaughterhouse for the Big Macs to be made.

One thing is clear, in old YouTube you could explore like it was some kind of bulletin board or Hackernews site more of less, now you eat the slop it is put in front of you.

It would be great if their "ignition" could be turned off.

Just show me what I'm subscribed to.

I'm not interested in those shitty 10th time reshuffled recommendations.

My hand is hurting from this engagement porn - hard to click "not interested" anymore.

I made a chrome extension to mitigate the vicious cycle of recommendations that clicks on « new to you » automatically

https://github.com/julienreszka/always-new-to-you-youtube-ch...

i tend to forget what the youtube home page even looks like. years ago i bookmarked the subscription feed rather than the "home page". never looked back. thats what it should be!

User recommendation systems are very important, but large companies control the recommendation system, which can easily be manipulated by humans. Open source recommendation systems or decentralized recommendation systems are very important.

YouTube video recommendations are obviously controlled by the CCP(Chinese Communist Party)

Reminder that on Android you can pin the subscriptions shortcuts to your homepage, and open that directly.

Depends on the launcher, but usually: long tap the YouTube app, then long tap the subscriptions entry and move.

This is sad, I actually greatly miss the old homepage. Before personalized recommendations, when you were signed in, it used to show you what was up with channels you subscribed to; NOT just new videos they posted, but videos they commented on, liked, etc. It was sort of a social graph feed, but it worked very well for sort-of random-walking the site. The percentage of stuff you would see that is just random weird stuff was way higher and it made the experience a shit load more entertaining, even if the overall quality of the content was lower.

It's pretty obvious of course, but even in the best case, the recommendation algorithm mostly just intensifies what's already popular anyways. That's all it really can do, because "personalized" recommendations are not magic, they're barely even clever. Everyone knows you watch one cat video and then suddenly you are bombarded with cat videos. Watch one SNL clip and it will throw more at you. It will do this for anything. The word "personalized" makes it sound super sophisticated, but no matter how sophisticated it is, the end result is the same: all it really does is show you popular content that is very closely adjacent to stuff you've already watched. It doesn't know why you've watched things, so if you don't carefully trim your YouTube History, the recommendations can sometimes just slowly clog with things you are absolutely disinterested in.

That's really the best case scenario for the personalized recommendation algorithm though. The worst case is the other reality we face, which is the behaviors that it winds up rewarding. I mean let's face it, a major component to any recommendation algorithm is going to be your likelihood to click into the video. So is it any surprise that even some of the better channels on YouTube have fallen to horrid clickbait titles and thumbnails? "Top 5 worst didgeridoos (#3 shocked me!)" Terrible. You don't need a recommendation algorithm for clickbait to succeed, but recommendation algorithms amplify clickbait to the point where if you're not doing it to some degree you're literally getting penalized. No surprise that e.g. Linus Media Group has basically decided to constantly use terrible titles and thumbnails, it's literally what YouTube pays you to do. It's also clearly going to reward drama and other negative shit even more, as if people's natural tendency to gossip wasn't bad enough.

In my opinion this is just another casualty of the way software developers have come to think about users and user interactions, not about quality but about quantity. Developers talk about increasing metrics, but they only have a slight connection to what this actually means. There's very little concern about whether these algorithms are actually improving the experience or not, only that it is increasing the numbers, so surely the experience is better. The only hint that a user even exists is the idea in here that "we're missing the opportunity to show users what they want." But did they even attempt to answer whether that was actually what they did? Now YouTube at least asks users about the recommendations, but I'm not very convinced they actually do anything interesting with the resulting data.

I understand to some degree, though. I mean, YouTube in 2009 was almost certainly not on the path to solvency, and I am less sure every year if the web experiences I actually enjoyed could ever be sustainable. It's clear that websites which optimize for engagement and screen time are the ones that get all of the ad revenue, and the more shameless they are about it, the better it seems to work. I kind of hope some day, we can distill down what is wrong with these incentives so that we can penalize or even regulate them, because right now it just feels like websites are very manipulative to their users in ways that probably make their lives worse.

I watched a “transparent clothing review” video by accident and now my feed is filled with this junk.

Thanks, Kerry Rodden!

\s