This is very insightful. I have considered another, somewhat related idea: to sample a news / media site, over the course of time. The idea would be to illustrate how news bubble up and down in priority. It would for example be interesting to follow how a somewhat big but also controversial piece of news would be bumped down in priority as other news are added on top. As I understand, the news home pages changes very frequently to attract people to come back soon to see "what is new". This can have the effect that you miss out on something significant because it is already bumped down.
In the old days, when news was printed on paper, you would have one front page per day. I have no idea how many front pages there are per day now but probably dozens if not hundreds of variants, where only after some hours the biggest news is no longer the biggest.
With all our media resources and technology, it's crazy that there is no easy way to answer questions like "what happened politically in France in the last month?", "what were the economic developments in Africa in the last quarter?" or "what were the biggest battery technology advances in the last year?".
With the barrage of news it is very easy to miss a lot, especially if you want to keep up with multiple domains and geographical regions.
I would love some hierarchical listing that shows the most important news items for different time periods (week, month, quarter, year), and filterable by domain (eg business, economy, politics, science, technology, ...).
One should be able to continuously drill down. Eg start with all news world wide. Then show only Europe, then only eg Sweden, then the economy of Sweden. Same thing with topics. With each entry linking multiple articles from quality sources, across the political spectrum.
I would happily pay 25+/month for such an aggregator with the appropriate quality. Which probably would mean hand-curated lists (opening up all sorts of of bias problems, but still).
Edit: I wonder if this could be crowd-sourced via a dedicated platform.
Just to offer a bit of insight, the primary vector of entry for new and repeat visitors on news sites is now a specific article, not a section front like a homepage. So, a typical article is literally the de-facto homepage you're imagining. Unless it has a sidebar (rare in the mobile age), it'll look just as anonymous as any other article.
To be sure, sections (such as a homepage) still do get significant number of visits. However, the numbers I speak of differ by an order of magnitude. Articles really are the homepages now, this isn't a blind generalization.
There's a bit of a Heisenberg effect involved here. We know not to spend too much time dressing a section front, but we know we'll be judged for it by you. So we put stuff up there that might be what you think we should think to be significant, or else you'll lose your trust in our judgment.
But by no means does seeing the placement tell you anything about effectiveness of placement.
Now that I've had a chance to click through each of the sections and browse different days I want to follow up.
First, a lot of the videos are pretty old, multiple years old. That seems weird but idk maybe that's how YouTube works I guess.
There's not a lot of variety in the channels on each section. This is likely due to what subscriptions are setup.
Most of the videos are pretty tame. I've seen a lot worse casually browsing YT so I think being able to crank it up to 11 would be a fun feature of the site.
Observations based solely on what I saw,
Fruitarians seem to be about eating healthy and working out.
Preppers are about diy living off the grid and less about stockpiling guns.
Liberals watch a lot of comedy news type shows and music reviews. Most of their focus is what Republicans are doing
Conservatives have a show featuring Tito Ortiz who is famous for taking a lot of brain damage in the UFC which I thought was funny. More to their category tho, it featured a lot of videos doing "gotchas" on liberals.
Conspiracists watch a lot of videos by some guy named Shane and unsolved mysteries videos.
Climate Deniers I think this channel wasn't tuned right or maybe they really do watch a lot of videos put out by the oil industry (they aren't obfuscating this)
Came to say the same. The notes mention that the profiles are updated daily, I wonder if “Flat Earther” used to be a profile. Perhaps reimertz chose that post title because it concisely conveys the spirit of the site, even if it isn’t an actual option.
I would be described as a "climate denier" by many people here, but my YouTube recommendations have zero overlap with the fictional recommendations. This is because I do not feel any need to prop up my opinions with endless wacky video propaganda.
Look, I'm sure there are plenty of people who get sucked into bubbles of YouTube nonsense, and sadly these recommendations may accurately represent the recommendations for typical users. But just deciding that someone is a "liberal" or a "conspiracy theorist" does not in fact mean that you can assume anything about what they are seeing on YouTube, which is what the title seems to claim. Please keep that in mind.
well, obviously Youtube isn't going to read your mind and figure out you're a climate denier. It's going to recommend your videos based on previous viewing, this is a preview of what people who view these types of videos will see.
I would have thought anyone on this site could discern that but you're self-proclaimed climate denier so I guess you did your best :)
I actually find the exercise on this TheirTube thing to be utterly useless. It has a real world validity on par with lie detectors and homeopathy.
A person, or group of people, set up this site and built YouTube profiles on what they think people in these categories are like. Then they use those profiles to show "what these people see". The problem is few actual, real individuals match these caricatures. The people that built this site aren't "them", except within a limited one of the presented profiles or two. My only hope is that nobody tries to build an argument around the outcomes of this exercise.
I think if anything is to be learned, it's the biases and preconceptions of the people that built the site moreso than anything about how YouTube builds recommendations... re-enforcing or otherwise (and I'm no fan of YouTube recommendations, either).
Cool idea, I've always wanted to do this but instead of using political lines, I've always wanted to know what the recommendations of the peoples of Indian reservations, the black belt, other ethnic enclaves in and outside of America etc. This app seems to exist more for social media activism than for building insight into the lives of different peoples (which is absolutely okay and needs to be said, but still). Are there other websites like this out there?
Try to push your youtube bubble around. It takes days to weeks.
Unfortunately you'll need to already know a number of entry searches to "seed" the movement. After that you can try to just move around by surfing from the seeds.
I think it's easier if your target bubble uses a different script, or at least a different language.
This is why I browse incognito, clear my cookies, use a VPN, and don't participate in the phenomenon of recommended content. I don't want some algorithm telling me what I should want.
Honestly I really like Youtube's recommendation algorithm. I'm a car guy and so most of my Youtube consumption is in car culture. I think the key to living with it is not to block it and avoid it at all costs, but rather to understand what the underlying algorithm is doing (broadly speaking).
It's funny that once I became a software developer (frontend specifically), things like dark patterns and other UI features that try to keep users on the app is very interesting to me. I will never put something like that in my own code but it's still interesting to pick up dark patterns out of every day apps we use (Instagrams "slot machine of dopamine" is one that comes to mind)
I never feel like I am in this group, but maybe it's because I frequently search out opinions, views, and beliefs I may not agree with, and add them to my algorithmic considerations.
I was watching some motorcycle videos overseas, and of course liked (button click) them. This then had my entire channel filled with languages i dont understand.
The fix is to remove all liked videos, problem, I had over 15,000 liked videos over decades(s?) of use. I finally found a howto, a script to run in chrome to remove all my likes.
Also I have an addon that lets me put channels into categories, addon called PocketTube. It lets me see unfiltered access to my channel choices, and youtube hates its direct access and if I open a video in a new tab, it prompts me for a captcha. I've ended up watching youtube in a VM with a VPN so I can change locations due to youtube's heavy handed behavior. I also will just copy the URL and watch on my desktop.
Really, youtube content is vast and un-navigable, they filter results, show in the wrong default order, wont remember settings of order, removed language choice filter.
The 80/20 rule, or top 10%, Pareto principle, whatever you want to call the cream on the top problem. The problem is small popular percentage of content. Youtube is pushing popular videos, and you miss out on all the lower popular videos, hiding 80% of the content, many new creators go unnoticed and unviewed.
There is a demand for a front end portal, that runs unfiltered but allows search controls, skip popular, view ascending order of all content, view by category only, be able to exclude content, exact search phrase allow, no shadow banned or hidden content rules, no white list rules (by default).
I cant be the only one tired of facebook/google/twitter showing me what they think I want, i didnt ask them to be my parser of content, just because I use their service, as its the only game in town, I still dont want spoon fed content.
Same problem with podcasts, a search function vs a browse directory. There are so many podcasts, and most places give you the top 10 podcasts per search.
I think a unfiltered directory of content providers (any platform), tired with advertising, crowd funding, etc would re-open the internet of new content, and take back the controlling behavior of mega corps.
I checked out the prepper channel and I actually like the videos that were on there. I know the gag here is that these are fringe topics, but this is a fun way to explore other topics.
I always like the general DIY stuff, the problem ends up being that if I watch one or two fun "how to can goods for the end of the world" videos or whatever YouTube inevitably starts recommending people talking about how they're going to start a race war and live in their bunker and kill all the immigrants and black people or something horrible along those lines. I used to live in an area with a lot of prepers and this was their prevailing thought. I'm not sure if it's a minority of the community or not, but it's what YouTube likes to recommend anyways.
Despite how drastically different the recommendations are for each persona, there seem to be some videos which are inexplicably nearly universally recommended. It's practically a meme - the top comment on many older videos is something along the lines of "See you all again in 5 years when Youtube decides to recommend this again" or "I didn't search for this. Neither did you."
Something I genuinely do not understand is the relation between conspiracy themed content and left/right politics.
Is there a correlation between YT's recommendation algorithm clearly seems to think there is as there are videos that I would describe as more tangentially political than topical on both the Climate Denier and Conspiracist pages.
I setup an RSS / ytdownloader script a year or two back for my subscriptions. It just mirrors the latest videos to my private CDN overnight, and sends me an email first thing in the morning with a digest. Much nicer way to watch YouTube
[+] [-] mongol|5 years ago|reply
In the old days, when news was printed on paper, you would have one front page per day. I have no idea how many front pages there are per day now but probably dozens if not hundreds of variants, where only after some hours the biggest news is no longer the biggest.
[+] [-] the_duke|5 years ago|reply
With the barrage of news it is very easy to miss a lot, especially if you want to keep up with multiple domains and geographical regions.
I would love some hierarchical listing that shows the most important news items for different time periods (week, month, quarter, year), and filterable by domain (eg business, economy, politics, science, technology, ...).
One should be able to continuously drill down. Eg start with all news world wide. Then show only Europe, then only eg Sweden, then the economy of Sweden. Same thing with topics. With each entry linking multiple articles from quality sources, across the political spectrum.
I would happily pay 25+/month for such an aggregator with the appropriate quality. Which probably would mean hand-curated lists (opening up all sorts of of bias problems, but still).
Edit: I wonder if this could be crowd-sourced via a dedicated platform.
[+] [-] _oqvz|5 years ago|reply
To be sure, sections (such as a homepage) still do get significant number of visits. However, the numbers I speak of differ by an order of magnitude. Articles really are the homepages now, this isn't a blind generalization.
There's a bit of a Heisenberg effect involved here. We know not to spend too much time dressing a section front, but we know we'll be judged for it by you. So we put stuff up there that might be what you think we should think to be significant, or else you'll lose your trust in our judgment.
But by no means does seeing the placement tell you anything about effectiveness of placement.
[+] [-] techbio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|5 years ago|reply
My filters also block out recommended videos on the righthand side of the video you are watching.
Here's what it looks like: https://imgur.com/a/uxpQE1J
If you'd like the same, enter this into your uBlock Filters. https://pastebin.com/PK1hdeEn
(Feedback and additions Welcome! This is something I hope to share with others to make YouTube a little less insufferable)
[+] [-] johnsoft|5 years ago|reply
https://invidio.us/
https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
You can host it yourself or use one of the many public installations: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/wiki/Invidious-Instances
[+] [-] lavios|5 years ago|reply
I use Stylus plugin to resize the videos and ublock filters to hide things like breaking news, views, "For You" search results etc.
Custom CSS in Stylus: https://pastebin.com/vcqVNfv4 Ublock Filters: https://pastebin.com/wsaTXG0H
[+] [-] petargyurov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cercatrova|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ideals|5 years ago|reply
Fruitarian, Prepper, Liberal, Conservative, Conspiracist, Climate Denier
The web design is really good! And it's funded by Mozilla which is cool
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ideals|5 years ago|reply
First, a lot of the videos are pretty old, multiple years old. That seems weird but idk maybe that's how YouTube works I guess.
There's not a lot of variety in the channels on each section. This is likely due to what subscriptions are setup.
Most of the videos are pretty tame. I've seen a lot worse casually browsing YT so I think being able to crank it up to 11 would be a fun feature of the site.
Observations based solely on what I saw,
Fruitarians seem to be about eating healthy and working out.
Preppers are about diy living off the grid and less about stockpiling guns.
Liberals watch a lot of comedy news type shows and music reviews. Most of their focus is what Republicans are doing
Conservatives have a show featuring Tito Ortiz who is famous for taking a lot of brain damage in the UFC which I thought was funny. More to their category tho, it featured a lot of videos doing "gotchas" on liberals.
Conspiracists watch a lot of videos by some guy named Shane and unsolved mysteries videos.
Climate Deniers I think this channel wasn't tuned right or maybe they really do watch a lot of videos put out by the oil industry (they aren't obfuscating this)
[+] [-] nemosaltat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creaghpatr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guscost|5 years ago|reply
Look, I'm sure there are plenty of people who get sucked into bubbles of YouTube nonsense, and sadly these recommendations may accurately represent the recommendations for typical users. But just deciding that someone is a "liberal" or a "conspiracy theorist" does not in fact mean that you can assume anything about what they are seeing on YouTube, which is what the title seems to claim. Please keep that in mind.
[+] [-] Trowter|5 years ago|reply
I would have thought anyone on this site could discern that but you're self-proclaimed climate denier so I guess you did your best :)
[+] [-] sbuttgereit|5 years ago|reply
A person, or group of people, set up this site and built YouTube profiles on what they think people in these categories are like. Then they use those profiles to show "what these people see". The problem is few actual, real individuals match these caricatures. The people that built this site aren't "them", except within a limited one of the presented profiles or two. My only hope is that nobody tries to build an argument around the outcomes of this exercise.
I think if anything is to be learned, it's the biases and preconceptions of the people that built the site moreso than anything about how YouTube builds recommendations... re-enforcing or otherwise (and I'm no fan of YouTube recommendations, either).
Esse quam videri
[+] [-] skim_milk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 082349872349872|5 years ago|reply
Unfortunately you'll need to already know a number of entry searches to "seed" the movement. After that you can try to just move around by surfing from the seeds.
I think it's easier if your target bubble uses a different script, or at least a different language.
[+] [-] ZinniaZirconium|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _fat_santa|5 years ago|reply
It's funny that once I became a software developer (frontend specifically), things like dark patterns and other UI features that try to keep users on the app is very interesting to me. I will never put something like that in my own code but it's still interesting to pick up dark patterns out of every day apps we use (Instagrams "slot machine of dopamine" is one that comes to mind)
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dimitrios1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aerovistae|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkitaip|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metafunctor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spuz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mendelmaleh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IronWolve|5 years ago|reply
The fix is to remove all liked videos, problem, I had over 15,000 liked videos over decades(s?) of use. I finally found a howto, a script to run in chrome to remove all my likes.
Also I have an addon that lets me put channels into categories, addon called PocketTube. It lets me see unfiltered access to my channel choices, and youtube hates its direct access and if I open a video in a new tab, it prompts me for a captcha. I've ended up watching youtube in a VM with a VPN so I can change locations due to youtube's heavy handed behavior. I also will just copy the URL and watch on my desktop.
Really, youtube content is vast and un-navigable, they filter results, show in the wrong default order, wont remember settings of order, removed language choice filter.
The 80/20 rule, or top 10%, Pareto principle, whatever you want to call the cream on the top problem. The problem is small popular percentage of content. Youtube is pushing popular videos, and you miss out on all the lower popular videos, hiding 80% of the content, many new creators go unnoticed and unviewed.
There is a demand for a front end portal, that runs unfiltered but allows search controls, skip popular, view ascending order of all content, view by category only, be able to exclude content, exact search phrase allow, no shadow banned or hidden content rules, no white list rules (by default).
I cant be the only one tired of facebook/google/twitter showing me what they think I want, i didnt ask them to be my parser of content, just because I use their service, as its the only game in town, I still dont want spoon fed content.
Same problem with podcasts, a search function vs a browse directory. There are so many podcasts, and most places give you the top 10 podcasts per search.
I think a unfiltered directory of content providers (any platform), tired with advertising, crowd funding, etc would re-open the internet of new content, and take back the controlling behavior of mega corps.
[+] [-] gundmc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamWhited|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lanius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Svip|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CravingLogic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ravenstine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|5 years ago|reply
Is there a correlation between YT's recommendation algorithm clearly seems to think there is as there are videos that I would describe as more tangentially political than topical on both the Climate Denier and Conspiracist pages.
[+] [-] thomasfromcdnjs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnmaguire2013|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tlow|5 years ago|reply
Great website with excellent design that provides a thoughtful exploration of the youtube's online "echo chambers".
[+] [-] GaryNumanVevo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootsudo|5 years ago|reply
That's why I just use it for music.