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A big part of their algorithm is keeping you on the site longer. It does this by showing you many low quality suggestions (because most people will sift through and consume them) before getting to the higher quality videos. Then, just before you were about to leave, they show something likely to keep you there. After being rewarded with a good video people often stick around hoping that they'll find another similar quality video. It hardly matters if this is a learned behavior or a hand crafted algorithm.

They are not interested in learning what videos you like. They're interested learning what will keep you there longer. If this is a learned behavior then pretty much the only way to train the algorithm is to tune out more often.

This is not a system that favors quality content. It favors ad views. This is an ad network. Even if you pay to hide the ads, you still get treated this way. Even if you pay for it, content creators still get treated like shit if they don't produce ad friendly content. Ads are the boss, not you.

I have, in my subscription list, creators that I watch 100% of their content without exception going back years. If left to YT suggestions I'll see that content weeks after release. You must use the subscription page to see content in a timely manor. This is demonstratively so.

My subscription page grows pretty much because I'm tipped off about good content from sources off YouTube or callouts/collaborations from creators I follow.

I don't know how much longer we'll have the subscription page since it directly subverts the malgorithm. You may need to rely on an external tool soon. Remember, you're not the boss despite "you" being in the branding.

Also, even good creators are resorting to click bait in a "if you can't beat them" bid. Yes, the algorithm is having a negative impact on quality. There's not much you can do to fix it. The best you can hope to do is side step the permanent problem. Look me up next year before you call my pessimism misplaced.

This is what keeps me preferring password based security because I can backup my encrypted password database offsite with ease. Everything else provides hard path to recovery.

I have lots of UEFI hardware with never-to-be-fixed bugs that are mitigated by just using BIOS boot. These are from Dell and Supermicro.

The Dells when set for UEFI would boot 50% of the time and 100% of the time in BIOS mode. The workaround was well known and is the only reasonable thing to do. It's EOL from dell it will never be patched.

The Supermicro's would work great in UEFI but the factory default was BIOS boot. The trouble is that these particular systems had a reasonably high chance of loosing BIOS setup data if they took a power hit (APC UPS are complete garbage FWIW). We'd have to send someone to a remote location to switch it back to UEFI or just reinstall in BIOS mode. By default they would remarkably turn back on when the power was restored and would recover fine if they could boot.

This stuff isn't useless or even THAT old. It's just unreliable in UEFI mode. While most newer stuff from these brands have more reliable UEFI, we're going to keep using hardware that is good enough. We work around hardware/firmware problems because there's nothing out there that doesn't have quirks. "Old" hardware has known quirks that have workarounds that have already been "paid for" with expended labor. New hardware has new quirks that you have to pay off.

Of course it's all moot for this discussion as we don't use rolling quirk factories like Fedora.

And yes, this is an everywhere problem and therefore Go can't be faulted. And yes everyone's pet language has solved it anyway. Thankfully no one uses anything but silver bullets today. /s

Hard problems are still hard, I suppose.

Yeah but Netflix is the one that most frequently gives me hope before smashing it. Ha ha, I got to get out of these abusive relationships.

From the article, fyi.

> slowing at a rapid pace because of increasing competition from Apple, Amazon, Disney and HBO.

I don't doubt that but I do suspect other services will see some slow down too as a result of general bullshit and uncertainty in the economy. It's never really just one thing.

Then again...yeah Disney+ is a really good deal. And Amazon's numbers are inflated from other Prime stuff. I'm just an old man yelling at a screen from his arm chair because I can't trust anyone.

I do wish they'd pick up a few more good Sci-Fi shows and then cancel them to confirm my personal grudge. It's so hard to waste my time on today's Sci-Fi...get off my lawn, etc, etc.

Observe the natural state of every software developer. I kid... or do I?

> What if it wasn’t just some fantastical explanation?

Doesn't sound nearly as fantastical but bad RAM is probably more common than one would expect. You seldom really know the quality of hardware you run on. Just say'n, sometimes you don't need a helping cosmic ray.

You don't get points for what *can be* but *what is*.

Worse is that, to a search engine, every USB product is exactly the same. Search engines take very specific queries and overgeneralize them to the point of uselessness. In the case of USB cables, basically every conductor fits--yes, even the god damned Romex. Some hyperbole sure, but it's hard to find a cable that can do more than charge a phone. "Smart" search engine "AI" has "learned" that SuperSpeed = USB = Wire = Romex. Auh god it's hard to put down the bitter sarcasm.

Having to click hundreds of product pages to look for specifics that a search engine stripped away is hell. It's not even like it's limited to USB. Try finding memory... surprise! Just like everything is a USB.... everything is a DDR. ECC, the very specific thing you need, is DDR. It literally doesn't matter if you put ECC in your query. Because DDR = DDR.

Specs don't help sell the product because search engines will take all of that spec sheet and decide it's exactly "USB."

And don't get me started on bad product pages that claim to sell "SuperSpeed 480 Mbit/s charging cables" Yup, Optimized. What does a search engine learn about that product page? Some people buy it therefore: relevance +9999. "I was tricked" never makes it back to the engine. You can't even flag a product page as inaccurate anymore.

I'm so exhausted that I don't want to buy anything anymore. Search engines were better when they gave you two results for some queries. At least then you knew that the engine wasn't capable of servicing the query in a useful way. You used to be able to hone your "search skill." No longer. You don't need to because now we have learning machines that... can't tell the difference between "gave up in futility" and "found what I was looking for."

What a spectacular failure search is today.

/rant

If it's genuinely useful and you're a transparent organization then it should be an easy thing to write up. "See! We avoided this *catastrophic* thing!" Demonstrate that the data has a very defining role in decision making or just get rid of it. The demonstration of its usefulness needs to continue as long as the tracking does. What significant problem(s) is being solved here? Sated curiosity isn't that compelling.

It would be nice if Google would ask you the simple question: "Did you find what you're looking for?" Instead they rely on the assumption that users only stop looking when they've found what they're looking for.

These days, there's a reasonably high chance that I quit looking because I gave up in futility--not because I found what I was looking for.

It's also the case that there's no way to train Google not to omit search terms or generalize them to the point of uselessness.

I really wish abusive SEO were the only problem but it's far from the case. Search results being crappy is a cumulative effect. You could solve SEO spam and I'll still not be able to find a USB SuperSpeed cable because it gets generalized to "usb cable" and there are a gazillion more charging cables than there are SuperSpeed cables.

Used to be that you could quote things to indicate that you really meant it. That's fuzzy now too. Every time we figure out how to circumvent the bad results, features are removed.

I really wish there was an easy way to do this. Price has largely been decoupled from quality. Reviews are fake. Flaws are not obvious until it's too late. You don't have the right to repair. Warranties are useless. Companies are basically not competing on quality--they're not directly colluding but in effect...

That's a bias that gets tugged around by the bias of extremes rather than the sensible. Sorry, I hate that term because it is often used to imply that you can average a wrong and a right and get something more correct. Often enough, one side[1] is decently close to right on an issue and the other is pretty much wrong. Picking the center of that isn't more right.

Often the quest for "neutrality" is bunk. In flat-world vs round-world, the flat-world is not with equal standing but the "neutral" seeking would often present as if the flat-world idiots have a case. While issues may have some subjectivity, we should not constantly pretend that there's an even distribution.

A neutral language meter can't ever hope to be right. It's not an analysis of what's well supported. Rather it's an analysis of assertiveness. I'm very assertive about the world being fucking round. I'm a red flag for such a bias meters.

Sorry if I'm going off but--I'll just go a head and say it--that term triggers the fuck out of me for getting undeserved validity.

[1] On a per issue basis. This is not to imply that one side is more consistently correct across issues.

Pretty much all of history. We love it when facts supporting our beliefs are isolated in a single source. We also love it when a source is ambiguous enough to let us draw our own conclusions.

The lie of omission has a long track record of being effective. It has the benefit of being useful to the source and/or the receiver. There's redundancy in falsehood selectors. Either the source will lie or we, on the receiving end, will lie. The truth often doesn't stand a chance; somebody is gonna find a way to isolate.

Trust is not a behavior that is reliably rational. One could argue that it always has an element of emotional attachment to the familiar.

I don't think you understand how software development works. Q: How much hardware do you need? A: How much you got?

The latest generation only gets the battery longevity because software developers still have to support the previous generation. As soon as enough e-waste happens, the gains disappear.

I might be a cynic but there sure seems to be a lot of empirical data to support my disorder.

The "hard problem" is finding the balance. Don't be a UI developer that lets beauty eclipse speed, reliability, usability, repeatability, cost--every. last. fucking. time.

The author is on to something in that academia's "one dimensional" evaluation shouldn't be used in the real world.

In my experience faster hardware leads to worse software. I'm doing the same things I've always done on my "smart" phone but apparently the same sized text messages now need more phone. Good god, ICQ from 2000 had more user facing features than texting apps and that was running on Windows-swap-everything-unconditially.

Yeah, much software development time is spent on invisible "features" that aren't relevant to the poor bastards that will have to use it. It makes the case for the more vertical in-house software development. There's much less push back to specialized features which often aren't nearly as specialized as the outside developer thinks it is because of absent understanding of the job fortified by arrogance.

But even when the job is well understood... display fucking words on the screen... I mean, come on! Why am I ever waiting 3 seconds after unlock for that?

Ok. You get to live.