We don't need human-curated Youtube, we need to give more control to users.
The annoying thing about Youtube is that many of the problems I have with their algorithm could very, very easily be solved if the designers gave up their relentless mantra of "never ask the user anything directly."
I watch playlists and LetsPlays, and occasionally my homepage will just turn into a massive wall of recommendations from the same playlist, rather than one recommendation for the next video in the list. That's hard to solve algorithmically, but very easy if you give me a button to press that says, "when recommending a playlist, only recommend one video."
It's very hard to algorithmically figure out whether or not a user wants repeated recommendations because repeated recommendations tend to steer users towards repeated views even if they would prefer other behavior. But Youtube has view history for users. It would be very easy to have a button to press that says, "don't recommend videos I've already watched."
But at some point, everyone working on AI/algorithms decided that the best user experience would be for users to try and on-the-fly intuit the quirks of every algorithm and then to do reinforcement training based on their partial understanding of how things work. The last thing I want as a user is to have to treat my computer like a cat.
Playlists can be semantically different things. They can be "top 50 songs of 2018" or they can be "history of WW2 parts 1-50". It might make sense to recommend more than one video fron the first kind of playlist, but not the second.
The majority of my YouTube recommendations are videos I’ve already watched, despite there being innumerable videos in the back catalogues of my subscriptions I have not seen. My wife has the exact same problem.
Surely I haven’t seen all of YouTube. I would love if it recommended me things I would be remotely interested in watching, even if they were “garbage” over this. At this point I would almost prefer sketchy conspiracy theory video recommendations.
I have a tendency to rewatch videos over and over, or rather, replay them because they make for good not-too-distracting background noise (I do the same with “The Big Lebowski”). Nearly my entire recommendations feed is videos I’ve seen a dozen times or more, and because I often visit YouTube to just quickly find something for background noise, I’ll just click whatever’s near the top. And next time I visit YouTube...those videos are at the top again.
That’s kind of annoying to me but I figured that it’s a problem of my own making. But it sounds like the algorithm behaves this way for other users who aren’t as weirdly repetitive as me?
This article has a catchy title, but is absolutely terrible. Curated human recommendations and/or "YouTube staffers should think like journalists" are both two of the worst ideas for the internet I've heard in quite a long time. They don't reduce bias by any significant amount consistently (and I suspect the authors know this), and thinking of a platform where millions of seperate people upload ungodly amounts of content per second as a platform to be curated just like a news site is just fundamentally misunderstanding the scale and nature of Cyberspace.
I think it is a case of "riding crop makers demand cars and trains use more horses". Self interested willful ignorance that it doesn't work that way and besides - if you want nothing is stopping you from maintaining your own lists on YouTube - but it probably won't be popular. They need to earn the position they want - not getting handed to them after demanding it.
The curated playlists on Google Music are pretty nice. I wouldn't mind seeing something like that for video, especially targeted at kids with various age ranges, activities, moods, and interests.
I don’t even buy the reasoning that the recommendations are somehow “personalized,” because they don’t seem to be... At all. I have never watched a political video on YouTube, or really anything unrelated to music or computer science, yet my “recommended videos” are always full of Ben Shapiro and his ilk. It’s easier to find relevant videos by doing a regular Google search, which is a little ironic.
I think YouTube in general has little understanding of how to manage content, which is a weird problem for an arm of Google.
I had a bit of a wake-up call as to just how bad the problem was when I saw video search results for "GPLv4". Normal search engine? No problem. GNU Public License. YouTube? Nope. A bunch of videos from a "gplv4.org" when I try the search just now, which evidently has nothing to do with open source licensing.
You can generally avoid political talk shows by clicking the not interested button. They still bubble up, especially if you watch general interest videos that have primarily male audiences.
I recently read a plausible theory as to why Ben Shapiro keeps coming up: YouTube's algorithm is being gamed so it ends up believing that Shapiro videos have something to do with what you just watched. So some group of people/bots "watches" a lecture on the mating habits of the red-tailed swallow, then Shapiro, then another lecture on birds, then Shapiro again. Eventually, YT thinks Shapiro vids are related to bird lectures, and makes the recommendations.
I live in a non-English speaking country, and looking at the trending lists and friend's playlists, all the recommendations are in the local language. My recommendations are 80% English and 20% local language (local stuff that I do watch).
70% of my recommendations are also centered around the interests I watch - technology, old computer restoration, etc.
I propose an idea, maybe: every video you watch, the original author of that video can set up a list of recommended videos to watch after you are done with the one you originally came for. This way, the original video author has a say in where you head in your Youtube rabbit-hole experience.
This is just off the top of my head early in the morning so probably not the best idea, but honestly it seems better than what they are doing now. Personally, I subscribe to a certain set of people and rarely watch videos outside of those content creators.
Edit: Just to add to my first point, I would be much more happy to follow the recommendation of the content creator I follow than some algorithm designed to get me to watch/click more.
They can already add suggested videos in end screens and in the info card drawer (although the info card drawer is not used nearly as often as it could be, and YouTube doesn't necessarily do a good job of drawing attention to it).
Am I the only person who gets actually relevant recommended videos when logged in?
I'd say 80% of the recommended videos are directly related to the interests I've shown with my viewing habits. I went through a period of watching at least an hour a day so perhaps that's it and they have some serious data behind me (and I never watch conspiracy, politics or prank videos for them to appear anywhere near them).
Whenever I'm logged out though, then yeah, complete dumpster-fire.
I just checked. The "up next" column seems pretty relevant. I probably wouldn't watch the Area 51 video or the "what did we find when we searched pennies" but they weren't awful ideas
I'm really happy with my YouTube recommendations as well. I'm sure they could be better at finding new stuff I haven't seen, but I don't get any "garbage" (e.g. I see no political stuff at all).
I also like how they're not afraid to surface older evergreen videos. I just got this 2-year-old video about a WW2-era Monopoly set recommended to me (never watched videos about board games, monopoly or WW2) and I thought it was fantastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsrC79QV7cU
Same for me. I've found that if I exhaust every video of every one of the few people I watch, it might start showing their videos once again, but only after it's been months since I've seen it and it's only one or two of the 10+ they put on the home page.
Worth noting that I pay for YT Premium, so maybe Google is training my recommendation model more or feeding more niche YouTube videos to it than they would for ad-driven (or ad blocking) viewers.
I've gotten some real gems, but also some really irritating stinkers. Recently YouTube recommended a newly uploaded song with ~12 views listed and that was fantastic, but at the same time they recommended a "this is what <game co>'s planning for <game>" video... that I'd already watched... from two years ago.
I use my current YouTube account for two and a half years. In this time period I clicked "Not interested" in the right sidebar with suggestions around 3000 times - very many times, and I keep clicking it. Due to this huge effort, when I watch videos of my interest scope, I mostly receive good suggestions and I'm satisfied with the suggestion system; however when I occasionally watch something unusual to me, I do receive bad suggestions and I keep clicking "Not interested". But already for a year I have not been suggested any "TOP 10 LIFEHACKS", reaction videos of obnoxious clowns, no previews with useless arrows and circles, O-faces, social experiments and pop-music from YouTube's Trending. Whenever I sometimes open YouTube from another computer, I fall into such deep disgust that my face expression twists. Another thing not related to this: I still use old YouTube's theme, it's faster and looks better than this modern "polymer" for touchscreens.
"fun" fact: "Not interested" button on Twitch uses a rolling ~300 item filo (First In, Last Out) list. Perfect placebo! You keep clicking and it keeps pretending to work.
Everything about YouTube doesn't fit my interests or preferences... to such an extent that I use YouTube-DL for almost all the things I watch off YouTube.
Recommendations are almost always garbage and I have no idea why. I also think that the search function is bad, like so bad that's it's somehow dishonest. I routinely run the same searches looking for the same thing but find stuff that was made well before the last time I ran the search... so why didn't the previous search uncover these results?
By design, the search function does not return an exhaustive list of content matching your search terms. It returns content that YouTube wants you to watch.
Well, click-driven advertisement and emotion-driven social media have disrupted the old (and well functioned) system of information pre-filtering and pre-selection by domain experts and journalists whose salary was dependent more on reputation than "engagement".
Now we're mowing the consequences of such "disruption".
Those “domain experts” were censoring men’s rights, for example. Only since Youtube are we discovering that male victims of home violence are 28% cases; If you listen to the “domain experts” they’ll pretend it is so small it’s not measurable, or pretend it’s not a problem.
That’s just an example for the area I’m expert in, but the current western political blowback is massively due to information flowing with fewer censorship, hence discovering that “domain experts” have led us to believe false or inaccurate things in the past.
“Domain experts” is also “TV-channel chosen domain experts” or “journalist-chosen domain experts” which has proven to provide erroneous results.
Regardless how to define what's garbage and what's not, YouTube seems to remove demonetized videos from recommendations.
Since I don't think that good content is always necessarily advertiser-friendly, a lot of good videos are just not getting any attention because a few big companies decided that they're not helpful to market their products.
Example: Historical or educational videos which are about controversial topics or just have the word "war" in their title.
Basically, their recommendations algorithm favors profit from advertising over personalized recommendations because it seems to be designed to maximize click-through rate and watch time for videos with many ads. [1]
I use the cosmetic filtering feature of Ublock Origin [1] to block everything except the video and related controls. I then only access youtube via the "subscriptions" page [2]. This effectively blocks the recommendations, autoplays, linked videos etc that make YouTube feel like such a cesspit.
It's like this hasn't improved since the late 2000s. If I forget to disable autoplay and it eventually ends up on a LinusTechTips, it'll be another week before I stop getting recommended nothing but those after every video.
If this behavior is based off aggregate watching patterns, can we at least get the patterns applied to us of people who match our usage demographics and not the tens of thousands of pre-teens being raised by YouTube?
Typically almost none of my recommended videos are relevant.
The worst part is that what they do recommend are often conspiracy videos, "X destroys Y" debate videos, extremist 'alternative' news, and other similar trash.
You would think they could tell from what I've watched already that none of their recommendations are remotely relevant to me- and in fact, are often the opposite of anything I would ever want to see.
To offer a counterpoint, I absolutely love YouTube recommendations.
Once you get into watching videos belonging to a new field, you get a lot of recommendations for that, and it's great to use them to get a good nice overview of the field.
Likewise, repeat recos for songs etc are also very very convenient.
I think this is again a case of the vocal minority making it feel like everything sucks.
YouTube is toxic for humans, because it is not a platform serving humans. It is a platform serving copyright holders and advertisers. Next video playing means copyright levy going somewhere to someone, one more ad impression (interesting glitch had been present in Germany unil recently where copyright holders were too greedy for such arrangement to operate, only proving how low priority, if any at all, a human user is). Trends and moods are being traced globally only to accumulate the both. What audio and video will be presented to a human is absolutely no concern for anyone - whichever will sustain the inflow of the copyright levies and ad impressions.
"When a video finishes playing, YouTube should show the next video in the same channel."
This is how it worked just a couple years ago. I would binge-watch a channel's entire history of videos on history, board games, or other fascinating subjects in the background while I did other things. At some point it changed, and now every video I watch gets followed by some click-bait often highly-political nonsense meant to get me outraged or shocked at something.
I've decided to turn it off and just stream documentaries on Curiosity Stream now. When I do watch YouTube, I get nagging pop-ups asking me to upgrade my service, but why would I do that when they've ruined what I enjoyed about the site?
Google's too busy optimizing ad delivery for youtube to care. I recently updated the android app, only change I noticed was now ads extend over the description and comments until you click a little x. That never existed before the update.
Recently, my disliked Youtube change that the "Related videos" on the side of a video now first show 10 of my general "Recommended" videos instead of videos that are similar to the one I am currently watching...
I make a point to avoid watching recommended videos the exception being I tend to use youtube for researching products and recommended videos are actually helpful there.
My youtube process is to go straight to the subs page daily, add all the videos to a 'watch later' playlist* so whenever I go to youtube I always have a curated list of just for me content and I don't get sucked down the rabbit hole.
*not the watch later option because you cant change the order of those ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd kill for a marker on the subs page that said 'last visited'!
[+] [-] danShumway|6 years ago|reply
The annoying thing about Youtube is that many of the problems I have with their algorithm could very, very easily be solved if the designers gave up their relentless mantra of "never ask the user anything directly."
I watch playlists and LetsPlays, and occasionally my homepage will just turn into a massive wall of recommendations from the same playlist, rather than one recommendation for the next video in the list. That's hard to solve algorithmically, but very easy if you give me a button to press that says, "when recommending a playlist, only recommend one video."
It's very hard to algorithmically figure out whether or not a user wants repeated recommendations because repeated recommendations tend to steer users towards repeated views even if they would prefer other behavior. But Youtube has view history for users. It would be very easy to have a button to press that says, "don't recommend videos I've already watched."
But at some point, everyone working on AI/algorithms decided that the best user experience would be for users to try and on-the-fly intuit the quirks of every algorithm and then to do reinforcement training based on their partial understanding of how things work. The last thing I want as a user is to have to treat my computer like a cat.
[+] [-] ses1984|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donatj|6 years ago|reply
Surely I haven’t seen all of YouTube. I would love if it recommended me things I would be remotely interested in watching, even if they were “garbage” over this. At this point I would almost prefer sketchy conspiracy theory video recommendations.
[+] [-] danso|6 years ago|reply
That’s kind of annoying to me but I figured that it’s a problem of my own making. But it sounds like the algorithm behaves this way for other users who aren’t as weirdly repetitive as me?
[+] [-] rasz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naiveai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nasrudith|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] humanrebar|6 years ago|reply
The curated playlists on Google Music are pretty nice. I wouldn't mind seeing something like that for video, especially targeted at kids with various age ranges, activities, moods, and interests.
[+] [-] thosakwe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigochill|6 years ago|reply
I had a bit of a wake-up call as to just how bad the problem was when I saw video search results for "GPLv4". Normal search engine? No problem. GNU Public License. YouTube? Nope. A bunch of videos from a "gplv4.org" when I try the search just now, which evidently has nothing to do with open source licensing.
[+] [-] chapium|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HappySweeney|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|6 years ago|reply
I live in a non-English speaking country, and looking at the trending lists and friend's playlists, all the recommendations are in the local language. My recommendations are 80% English and 20% local language (local stuff that I do watch).
70% of my recommendations are also centered around the interests I watch - technology, old computer restoration, etc.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] apacheCamel|6 years ago|reply
This is just off the top of my head early in the morning so probably not the best idea, but honestly it seems better than what they are doing now. Personally, I subscribe to a certain set of people and rarely watch videos outside of those content creators.
Edit: Just to add to my first point, I would be much more happy to follow the recommendation of the content creator I follow than some algorithm designed to get me to watch/click more.
[+] [-] striking|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wastedhours|6 years ago|reply
I'd say 80% of the recommended videos are directly related to the interests I've shown with my viewing habits. I went through a period of watching at least an hour a day so perhaps that's it and they have some serious data behind me (and I never watch conspiracy, politics or prank videos for them to appear anywhere near them).
Whenever I'm logged out though, then yeah, complete dumpster-fire.
[+] [-] fortran77|6 years ago|reply
https://imgur.com/kG0uUDt
(And that Navier-Stokes video was very good!)
[+] [-] kalleboo|6 years ago|reply
I also like how they're not afraid to surface older evergreen videos. I just got this 2-year-old video about a WW2-era Monopoly set recommended to me (never watched videos about board games, monopoly or WW2) and I thought it was fantastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsrC79QV7cU
[+] [-] judge2020|6 years ago|reply
Worth noting that I pay for YT Premium, so maybe Google is training my recommendation model more or feeding more niche YouTube videos to it than they would for ad-driven (or ad blocking) viewers.
[+] [-] DuskStar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaosbutters|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] safeplanet-fesa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz|6 years ago|reply
I wonder if Google is not doing the same, as they do for Likes with 5000 limit https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/6m7k63/i_just_reac...
[+] [-] Quequau|6 years ago|reply
Recommendations are almost always garbage and I have no idea why. I also think that the search function is bad, like so bad that's it's somehow dishonest. I routinely run the same searches looking for the same thing but find stuff that was made well before the last time I ran the search... so why didn't the previous search uncover these results?
[+] [-] lizant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgudkov|6 years ago|reply
Now we're mowing the consequences of such "disruption".
[+] [-] alexis_fr|6 years ago|reply
That’s just an example for the area I’m expert in, but the current western political blowback is massively due to information flowing with fewer censorship, hence discovering that “domain experts” have led us to believe false or inaccurate things in the past.
“Domain experts” is also “TV-channel chosen domain experts” or “journalist-chosen domain experts” which has proven to provide erroneous results.
[+] [-] puranjay|6 years ago|reply
If I wanted sanitized, censored, controlled entertainment, I'd just watch TV
[+] [-] wolco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mxscho|6 years ago|reply
Basically, their recommendations algorithm favors profit from advertising over personalized recommendations because it seems to be designed to maximize click-through rate and watch time for videos with many ads. [1]
[1] https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=838
[+] [-] sails|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/ultimate-ublock-origin-superu... [2] https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
[+] [-] washadjeffmad|6 years ago|reply
If this behavior is based off aggregate watching patterns, can we at least get the patterns applied to us of people who match our usage demographics and not the tens of thousands of pre-teens being raised by YouTube?
[+] [-] kup0|6 years ago|reply
The worst part is that what they do recommend are often conspiracy videos, "X destroys Y" debate videos, extremist 'alternative' news, and other similar trash.
You would think they could tell from what I've watched already that none of their recommendations are remotely relevant to me- and in fact, are often the opposite of anything I would ever want to see.
[+] [-] kinkrtyavimoodh|6 years ago|reply
Once you get into watching videos belonging to a new field, you get a lot of recommendations for that, and it's great to use them to get a good nice overview of the field.
Likewise, repeat recos for songs etc are also very very convenient.
I think this is again a case of the vocal minority making it feel like everything sucks.
[+] [-] durnygbur|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ideonexus|6 years ago|reply
This is how it worked just a couple years ago. I would binge-watch a channel's entire history of videos on history, board games, or other fascinating subjects in the background while I did other things. At some point it changed, and now every video I watch gets followed by some click-bait often highly-political nonsense meant to get me outraged or shocked at something.
I've decided to turn it off and just stream documentaries on Curiosity Stream now. When I do watch YouTube, I get nagging pop-ups asking me to upgrade my service, but why would I do that when they've ruined what I enjoyed about the site?
[+] [-] grawprog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LordHeini|6 years ago|reply
Googles Youtube App drives me insane with all the crappy ads.
[+] [-] xboxnolifes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apricot13|6 years ago|reply
My youtube process is to go straight to the subs page daily, add all the videos to a 'watch later' playlist* so whenever I go to youtube I always have a curated list of just for me content and I don't get sucked down the rabbit hole.
*not the watch later option because you cant change the order of those ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd kill for a marker on the subs page that said 'last visited'!
[+] [-] frosted-flakes|6 years ago|reply