[stametseater]

I don't use many content recommendation systems, so maybe this isn't typical, but youtube's is very good at what it does. It knows I like videos about trains and ships, and suggests virtually nothing else to me. It doesn't need to guess at my motivation for liking trains, all it needs to do is give me train videos.

I think these systems are what you make out of them. If you click trashy content, it'll give you trashy content. If you click politically edgy content, you'll get more of that. If you only click on trains, you'll only get trains. Maybe people who complain about these systems have a totally different experience than me, or maybe they don't like what they see when a content recommendation engine holds up a mirror.

As for their perverse incentives and profit motive... if they're bad at anything, it's getting ad views from me.

[NoZebra120vClip]

I was fascinated by the concept promoted by Pandora: "digital DNA" of musical works. It was an exhaustive list of properties applied to each song they played, and it fed into their recommendation engine so that songs could be typed and matched with more stuff we wanna hear.

It failed me miserably.

Digital DNA, or at least its implementation on Pandora, was woefully inadequate in determining my motivation and reasons for selecting songs in a list. I created a Lenten playlist of penitential hymns, and the cardinal rule was: "NO ALLELUIA" which is not vocalized at all during the Lenten season. Well my recommendations were liberally sprinkled with joyous Easter shouts of the A-word, and my experience was ruined.

I may select songs based on particular lyric themes, seasonal considerations, bands based on their particular location or affiliation; things like that. Recommendation engines just have this kind of sledgehammer that goes "Oh! You like <Heavy Metal>! Here's some more <Heavy Metal> for ya!" when my use case doesn't even care about genre, but I was looking for lyrical themes or topics.

Also unlike Pandora, YouTube has one big firehose of recommendations. It is unable to segregate them within a playlist or a particular session for some purpose. The only way to isolate recommendations is by account or incognito, and that is one reason I have 3 separate personal accounts for different purposes, so that my main account's activity does not pollute the interests and recs of the special-purpose accounts.

[stametseater]

Ah right, I see what you mean. Supposing I tried to make youtube only show me videos of red trains, it would probably fail. It has a limited number of content bins and probably doesn't/can't synthesize new bins on the fly for individual users.

[magicalhippo]

I too find YouTube pretty good. But like you say I avoid clickbait and am careful with my likes. If it suggests too much I don't want, I'll tell it I don't want those.

[NoZebra120vClip]

There is a weekly game my friends play wherein one of them crafts a playlist, and then the rest of them attempt to guess the theme that holds it together. It's really fun!

My only contribution was a playlist of inappropriately-named bands, such as the Sisters of Mercy, the Cocteau/Thompson Twins, Concrete Blonde, etc. It stumped them.