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I find a lot of sites feel like they're overtuning their recommendation engines, to the detriment of using the site. YouTube is particularly bad for this - give

I find a lot of sites feel like they're overtuning their recommendation engines, to the detriment of using the site. YouTube is particularly bad for this - given the years of history and somewhat regular viewing of the site, I feel like it should have a relatively good idea of what I'm interested in. Instead, the YouTube homepage seems myopically focused on the last 5-10 videos I watched.

Dylan16807 9y ago
Trying youtube music recently made that abundantly clear, with an awful awful playlist extrapolated from something like 4 recent songs.
avar 9y ago
This is because they're not trying to give you stuff you'd generally like given your entire history. The recommendation feature powers the part of YouTube that auto-plays the upcoming video. So e.g. if I go and view Russian dashcam videos they're going to automatically play more of them, even though I've shown no prior interest in that topic. Having two systems for recommendations would introduce a lot of UI complexity, so I can see why they didn't go for that, and why the recommendations are consequently tuned for people who are actively watching videos on some topic right now.
- idyllei 9y ago
  I imagine it would be possible (though difficult) to autoplay videos which are related to each other and gradually converge to something that would interest the viewer. For example, Russian dash cams to Russia at night to the Russian sleep experiment creepypasta, to horror games to video games in general, if that is what the user tends to watch. I know this has graph theory written all over it and the shortest-distance problem has wreaked havoc for centuries, but I think with enough resources Google/YouTube could find a good compromise in this situation.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Having two systems for recommendations would introduce a lot of UI complexity, Do you mean, in terms of implementation or for the user? Because as the later, I think the two are already conceptually different (homepage vs next video), so I don't see how just feeding it different videos would make it more complex.
  - avar 9y ago
    For the user. What you're describing is still going to cause complex UX. So let's say I'm interested in exactly two things. Russian dash cam videos and videos of trains without narration. I go to the homepage and click on one type of video, what should the next video be? A random video from the two categories? One or the other? Should it show me a banner at the top indicating what recommendation mode I'm in (historical preference or "similar to current video"). Now I go and do the same on my Android YouTube app which has no real UI equivalent of a homepage, what happens then? This is a lot of UX complexity for a feature few probably care about.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Like I said, I think the homepage is already quite different from the next video in the user's perspective, so there's no need to show banners or anything like that. Homepage = full profile analysis, next video = similar to current. By the way, the Android app does absolutely have an UI equivalent of a homepage, it's even called "Home".
      - avar 9y ago
        I mean once the user selects a video you need to continue showing them context, because at this point they may not remember what mode they're in to begin with. Making your app behave differently because you navigated to the current state via different menus is very bad UX design. That's all I'm saying. Your suggestion would entail either UX complexity or such implicitly different behavior for YouTube. Yes Android has a "Home" button. But what I meant by no real UX equivalent is that when you open youtube on the web you'll open a new tab and go to youtube.com. When you do so an Android you've likely just dismissed the app in the past, and opening it again will bring you back to the last video you were viewing. You don't go through the homepage by default. Thus it's more of just another menu item on Android, not something that's equivalent to / on a website.
Florin_Andrei 9y ago
It's a hard problem. If they kept recommending old topics, you'd be like "hey, I quit watching pink zebra videos 5 years ago, stop recommending that stuff to me".
gthtjtkt 9y ago
> Instead, the YouTube homepage seems myopically focused on the last 5-10 videos I watched. Noticed the same thing happening for the past year or two. I used to be able to go on YouTube and find a variety of interesting videos I'd never seen before. It seemed like there was a good balance of categories in the recommendations. Now, I watch one boating video and suddenly my recommendations are 100% boat related with some random clickbait/viral garbage sprinkled in for good measure.
Semaphor 9y ago
I'm not sure if it is because of weird tastes or something else. But for sites like Steam, YT, Netflix I always wish for more tuning parameters because their recommendations are all horrible. On Netflix, for example, I get recommended stuff that's similar to other things I didn't like. Amazon is often the best of them for books because their engine seems to only really value the last few things I looked at / bought and so just recommends really similar stuff. Of course, that fails hard whenever I look at something I'm not interested in for whatever reason. On Steam I wish they had some elaborate filtering system, there are so many games, I need something like NOT(Adventure+Puzzle) BOOST(RPG), I need to combine tags, not just filter them out by themselves.
- crowbahr 9y ago
  Netflix, I think, has killed their own recommendation algorithm when they removed stars and made it boolean. I don't know if those buttons even do anything anymore because I think they're just matching based off demographic and who they're trying to market to now. It's recommending shows that I never would watch in a million years and giving them high matches despite me disliking most similar shows just because I'm a 20-something male.
  - ryanmaclean 9y ago
    I can't agree more - I'm a huge proponent for star rating systems. I get that they are perhaps more complicated than a Boolean value, but they help me out personally. I miss the days of "tap tap scroll four clicks" on the iPod to help me rate new music, specifically.
  - swenn 9y ago
    Interesting experience, I recently read an article that gave me the impression that they rather improved the system. Excerpt from https://www.appcues.com/blog/rating-system-ux-star-thumbs/ https://www.appcues.com/blog/rating-system-ux-star-thumbs/ "In addition to the new rating system, Netflix has new match percentages (up to 100%) to more accurately predict how much users will like something. ... The new rating system received 200% more ratings in A/B tests, according to Netflix VP of Product Todd Yellin. When it comes to rating movies and shows, stars reflect the preferences that people want to have, rather than how people actually behave. Todd gave the example of users giving 5 stars to a documentary but just 3 stars to an Adam Sandler movie that they watched over and over again. “What you do versus what you say you like are different things,” said Todd."
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Youtube is definitely over-weighing the last few videos. Then again, it's likely optimized for a different market segment. Especially with how many children are given tablets. Like, brief intense fascination with many subjects in general is genuinely hard to optimize for, especially when a huge portion of your market has long-lasting intense fascination with a few subjects.
- russdill 9y ago
  If I watch a video I ended up not being interested in, I delete it from my watch history to avoid YouTube spamming me.
  - hk__2 9y ago
    Can’t you "dislike" it instead?
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      I constantly get recommended more videos for something I dislike
      - patmcguire 9y ago
        If you're hate-watching, you're still watching.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    Hulu is the worst for this. Fall asleep watching a show I like, wake up with random shit in my queue that I can't convince Hulu I don't want to watch.
- rhizome 9y ago
  YouTube would rather you fall into a trance of continuing your recent viewing habits rather than providing a personalized library. It just makes better business sense.
tbcktu 9y ago
I hate this. Several years of nothing but a single genre of music in my history but watch one video about something different and get nothing but recommendations based on that. I have to clean up my watch history daily.
chongli 9y ago
If I had to guess, I would say YouTube is attempting to get you to watch new types of videos you've never watched before. By focusing on recent videos you've watched, they can try to convert you from a 1-off to a regular viewer of a particular genre.
gervase 9y ago
My supposition is that this is a response to changing tastes over time. However, I think 10 videos or less it probably an overreaction to this problem. For example, let's say they have a user who watches 100 videos a week, for ease of math. 50 of those videos are in "core" areas of interest - these do not change over time. An additional 35 are in areas of secondary interest: topics which have piqued the viewer's curiosity, but not deeply interested them. We can expect these topics to change every [1,4] weeks. The remaining 15 are referrals or clickbait from other websites. How can YouTube differentiate between these three classes of videos? The first class will be heavily represented in their subscriptions. Presumably, the viewer will prefer their recommendations to ignore the third class (clickbait). The second class is the hardest, as the user may want these videos surfaced, but then want them to decay over time as their interests change. I think this is the problem that they are attempting to solve, with varying degrees of success.
anigbrowl 9y ago
YouTube is weird. I made the mistake of watching a flat earth video last year in order to get a handle on that growing weirdo fad. Well it turns out that flat earthers are really avid content consumers (presumably because of the enormous cognitive reinforcement requirements to maintain such a belief) and YouTube really wanted to help me with that. It took a couple of months for it to stop offering me a portal to a better, flatter world every time I refreshed a page.
- duskwuff 9y ago
  For future reference, you can remove videos from your YouTube history if you're logged in: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history Once a video is removed from your history, you'll no longer get recommendations based on it. If you aren't logged in, you can't view or edit your viewing history, but you can at least clear it. (Which will return you to YouTube's terrible default viewer profile... sigh)
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Forgot about that! Thanks for the tip.
- Fomite 9y ago
  I similarly had that happen with some GamerGate stuff. Watched a video just to see if I could wrap my head around it, went "Nope!" and went on with my life, and the next thing I knew YouTube was desperately trying to send me down the alt-right rabbit hole.
gabrielgoh 9y ago
i think this is the right approach, you're not after all, the person you were 5 years ago, or even a week. most interests change with time, I lose interest in a topic very fast, and gain interest in another topic just as quickly. No good recommender system should be based off a reading of my "personality", whatever that may be - the most stable aspects of my personality, even if they can be divined from my viewing history, say little as to what I would be interested in watching next.
- ryanbrunner 9y ago
  I think that's a fair point, and I wouldn't expect a video I watched 10 years ago to factor in very heavily on what I'm seeing today. But at least in my experience, it doesn't appear that the engine takes anything that happened more than a few days ago into account. As an example: I watched a few episodes of Penn and Teller: Fool Us yesterday. I hadn't really watched it before, and while I like Penn and Teller in general, I don't remember watching them all that much on YouTube prior to yesterday (I'm sure at some point I had watched a video or two, but not more so than anything else I stumbled on.) Today, 12 of the top 30 videos on my YouTube home page are specifically Penn and Teller: Fool Us. Not magic in general, not Penn and Teller in general, but specifically that show. That seems like the very recent past is way overrepresented.
asah 9y ago
Sounds like an opportunity: deeper recommendations
Siecje 9y ago
Why are so many videos I have already seen? I guess people re-watch them, or show other people "Hey have you seen this". But for me it is just silly.
- tragic 9y ago
  Well, it sometimes makes sense. I, and many others, use YouTube as a music streaming service. Most people listen to most songs they like more than once. I dare say yt has gotten a good amount of ad revenue out of me listening to Darren Emerson's dub extravaganza mix of black sky by Shakespeare's sister, which is always in the recommendation panel for some reason...
jitix 9y ago
I concur that.. these days I have to clear my youtube history every few weeks to prevent it from spamming my page (and my fucking TV!) with suggestions related to random videos I watched over a short period of time. The videos I liked over the last 7-8 years seem to carry less weight. I wish there was a way to tune these behavior.
elif 9y ago
yeah, but i get the impression history is retained and utilized. If i watch 2-3 how-to videos i start getting how-to videos that are similar to my history, not just random how-to. then if i switch to skateboarding, i get skateboarding videos similar to my history. This seems like a good algorithm to me, as when i'm watching skateboard videos with my friends, I don't want "how to caulk tile joints" to show up
c3534l 9y ago
Part of that trend is because recommendation algorithms aren't all that interested in making recommendations anymore. They're interested in getting sales or views. To do this, they use dumber algorithms that are easier to understand ("people who bought this also bought...") and over-value recency. They're not helping you find new content, they're trying to prolong the time you're on youtube.
- revmoo 9y ago
  I have been paid to write an algorithm like this. It matched you to relevant content, but then a manually configured weighting table would skew results to more popular sources. It went as far as taking into account the number of leads we had sent each partner that month as a percentage of their quota
cameldrv 9y ago
The problem is the economics of the Internet today. Most sites are ad-funded. They need to maximize pageviews and time on site. The recommender is a huge part of accomplishing that, and it simply won't be tuned to any metric other than maximizing revenue. The solution would be to reskin popular sites with recommenders that had other objectives, such as retrospective satisfaction with time spent. Unfortunately sites know that if they give up control of the UI through an API that is open, they will lose money when people do things like this. I really think we're entering a crisis here where sites and apps that are engineered to maximize corporate metrics are leading people down horrible paths of addiction, and psychic stress as they spend their mental energy resisting temptations constantly thrown at them.
- wruza 9y ago
  They can at least do right recommendations if adblock detected.
  - eat_veggies 9y ago
    That incentivizes using adblockers though, and given that ads are pretty much YouTube's entire business model, that would be nice for you but terrible for the business. However, they do charge money per month for YouTube Red which removes ads, and a better recommendation system for Red subscribers might encourage people to buy it.
- phs318u 9y ago
  Thought just occurred: would I be willing to pay a subscription to have the recommender tuned to remove revenue maximisation and site-addiction maximisation? Would anyone? I've made plenty of "remove ads" in-app purchases on my phone. This isn't too different. And it might actually result in a truly useful experience.
  - dandare 9y ago
    There may be public relations problem - users these days understand that ads pay the bills and don't see them as a moral compromise but try to explain to your users that they can pay premium to get relevant recommendations instead of "spam".
chiefalchemist 9y ago
It's not just over tuning, but finding me things I might have missed. Not necessarily popular things, but thinks that appeal to me. For example, I get emails from Pocket "You saved a popular article..." And I think "Who cares?" Don't tell me what I know, tell me what I missed. YT is similar. It recommends things I've watched. I'm looking for new and interesting and I'm getting yesterday's news? That doesn't excite me.
freeflight 9y ago
I've moved pretty much all my music listening to YouTube due to simple convenience of easily being able to generate whole genre playlists based on one song. But because the playlists are dynamic, YouTube keeps on shoving songs from other playlists (and genres) into each other, trying to generate a "perfect playlist" and in the process making all the playlists sound very similar with no more genre distinctions except for the first couple of songs.
escribmac 9y ago
I agree. I've been reluctant to click amazon links because I know ads will follow me around for weeks if I look at a single product.

Dylan16807 9y ago

Trying youtube music recently made that abundantly clear, with an awful awful playlist extrapolated from something like 4 recent songs.

avar 9y ago

This is because they're not trying to give you stuff you'd generally like given your entire history. The recommendation feature powers the part of YouTube that auto-plays the upcoming video. So e.g. if I go and view Russian dashcam videos they're going to automatically play more of them, even though I've shown no prior interest in that topic. Having two systems for recommendations would introduce a lot of UI complexity, so I can see why they didn't go for that, and why the recommendations are consequently tuned for people who are actively watching videos on some topic right now.

idyllei 9y ago
I imagine it would be possible (though difficult) to autoplay videos which are related to each other and gradually converge to something that would interest the viewer. For example, Russian dash cams to Russia at night to the Russian sleep experiment creepypasta, to horror games to video games in general, if that is what the user tends to watch. I know this has graph theory written all over it and the shortest-distance problem has wreaked havoc for centuries, but I think with enough resources Google/YouTube could find a good compromise in this situation.
icebraining 9y ago
Having two systems for recommendations would introduce a lot of UI complexity, Do you mean, in terms of implementation or for the user? Because as the later, I think the two are already conceptually different (homepage vs next video), so I don't see how just feeding it different videos would make it more complex.
- avar 9y ago
  For the user. What you're describing is still going to cause complex UX. So let's say I'm interested in exactly two things. Russian dash cam videos and videos of trains without narration. I go to the homepage and click on one type of video, what should the next video be? A random video from the two categories? One or the other? Should it show me a banner at the top indicating what recommendation mode I'm in (historical preference or "similar to current video"). Now I go and do the same on my Android YouTube app which has no real UI equivalent of a homepage, what happens then? This is a lot of UX complexity for a feature few probably care about.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Like I said, I think the homepage is already quite different from the next video in the user's perspective, so there's no need to show banners or anything like that. Homepage = full profile analysis, next video = similar to current. By the way, the Android app does absolutely have an UI equivalent of a homepage, it's even called "Home".
    - avar 9y ago
      I mean once the user selects a video you need to continue showing them context, because at this point they may not remember what mode they're in to begin with. Making your app behave differently because you navigated to the current state via different menus is very bad UX design. That's all I'm saying. Your suggestion would entail either UX complexity or such implicitly different behavior for YouTube. Yes Android has a "Home" button. But what I meant by no real UX equivalent is that when you open youtube on the web you'll open a new tab and go to youtube.com. When you do so an Android you've likely just dismissed the app in the past, and opening it again will bring you back to the last video you were viewing. You don't go through the homepage by default. Thus it's more of just another menu item on Android, not something that's equivalent to / on a website.

Florin_Andrei 9y ago

It's a hard problem. If they kept recommending old topics, you'd be like "hey, I quit watching pink zebra videos 5 years ago, stop recommending that stuff to me".

gthtjtkt 9y ago

> Instead, the YouTube homepage seems myopically focused on the last 5-10 videos I watched. Noticed the same thing happening for the past year or two. I used to be able to go on YouTube and find a variety of interesting videos I'd never seen before. It seemed like there was a good balance of categories in the recommendations. Now, I watch one boating video and suddenly my recommendations are 100% boat related with some random clickbait/viral garbage sprinkled in for good measure.

Semaphor 9y ago

I'm not sure if it is because of weird tastes or something else. But for sites like Steam, YT, Netflix I always wish for more tuning parameters because their recommendations are all horrible. On Netflix, for example, I get recommended stuff that's similar to other things I didn't like. Amazon is often the best of them for books because their engine seems to only really value the last few things I looked at / bought and so just recommends really similar stuff. Of course, that fails hard whenever I look at something I'm not interested in for whatever reason. On Steam I wish they had some elaborate filtering system, there are so many games, I need something like NOT(Adventure+Puzzle) BOOST(RPG), I need to combine tags, not just filter them out by themselves.

crowbahr 9y ago
Netflix, I think, has killed their own recommendation algorithm when they removed stars and made it boolean. I don't know if those buttons even do anything anymore because I think they're just matching based off demographic and who they're trying to market to now. It's recommending shows that I never would watch in a million years and giving them high matches despite me disliking most similar shows just because I'm a 20-something male.
- ryanmaclean 9y ago
  I can't agree more - I'm a huge proponent for star rating systems. I get that they are perhaps more complicated than a Boolean value, but they help me out personally. I miss the days of "tap tap scroll four clicks" on the iPod to help me rate new music, specifically.
- swenn 9y ago
  Interesting experience, I recently read an article that gave me the impression that they rather improved the system. Excerpt from https://www.appcues.com/blog/rating-system-ux-star-thumbs/ https://www.appcues.com/blog/rating-system-ux-star-thumbs/ "In addition to the new rating system, Netflix has new match percentages (up to 100%) to more accurately predict how much users will like something. ... The new rating system received 200% more ratings in A/B tests, according to Netflix VP of Product Todd Yellin. When it comes to rating movies and shows, stars reflect the preferences that people want to have, rather than how people actually behave. Todd gave the example of users giving 5 stars to a documentary but just 3 stars to an Adam Sandler movie that they watched over and over again. “What you do versus what you say you like are different things,” said Todd."

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

Youtube is definitely over-weighing the last few videos. Then again, it's likely optimized for a different market segment. Especially with how many children are given tablets. Like, brief intense fascination with many subjects in general is genuinely hard to optimize for, especially when a huge portion of your market has long-lasting intense fascination with a few subjects.

russdill 9y ago
If I watch a video I ended up not being interested in, I delete it from my watch history to avoid YouTube spamming me.
- hk__2 9y ago
  Can’t you "dislike" it instead?
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    I constantly get recommended more videos for something I dislike
    - patmcguire 9y ago
      If you're hate-watching, you're still watching.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  Hulu is the worst for this. Fall asleep watching a show I like, wake up with random shit in my queue that I can't convince Hulu I don't want to watch.
rhizome 9y ago
YouTube would rather you fall into a trance of continuing your recent viewing habits rather than providing a personalized library. It just makes better business sense.

tbcktu 9y ago

I hate this. Several years of nothing but a single genre of music in my history but watch one video about something different and get nothing but recommendations based on that. I have to clean up my watch history daily.

chongli 9y ago

If I had to guess, I would say YouTube is attempting to get you to watch new types of videos you've never watched before. By focusing on recent videos you've watched, they can try to convert you from a 1-off to a regular viewer of a particular genre.

gervase 9y ago

My supposition is that this is a response to changing tastes over time. However, I think 10 videos or less it probably an overreaction to this problem. For example, let's say they have a user who watches 100 videos a week, for ease of math. 50 of those videos are in "core" areas of interest - these do not change over time. An additional 35 are in areas of secondary interest: topics which have piqued the viewer's curiosity, but not deeply interested them. We can expect these topics to change every [1,4] weeks. The remaining 15 are referrals or clickbait from other websites. How can YouTube differentiate between these three classes of videos? The first class will be heavily represented in their subscriptions. Presumably, the viewer will prefer their recommendations to ignore the third class (clickbait). The second class is the hardest, as the user may want these videos surfaced, but then want them to decay over time as their interests change. I think this is the problem that they are attempting to solve, with varying degrees of success.

anigbrowl 9y ago

YouTube is weird. I made the mistake of watching a flat earth video last year in order to get a handle on that growing weirdo fad. Well it turns out that flat earthers are really avid content consumers (presumably because of the enormous cognitive reinforcement requirements to maintain such a belief) and YouTube really wanted to help me with that. It took a couple of months for it to stop offering me a portal to a better, flatter world every time I refreshed a page.

duskwuff 9y ago
For future reference, you can remove videos from your YouTube history if you're logged in: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history Once a video is removed from your history, you'll no longer get recommendations based on it. If you aren't logged in, you can't view or edit your viewing history, but you can at least clear it. (Which will return you to YouTube's terrible default viewer profile... sigh)
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Forgot about that! Thanks for the tip.
Fomite 9y ago
I similarly had that happen with some GamerGate stuff. Watched a video just to see if I could wrap my head around it, went "Nope!" and went on with my life, and the next thing I knew YouTube was desperately trying to send me down the alt-right rabbit hole.

gabrielgoh 9y ago

i think this is the right approach, you're not after all, the person you were 5 years ago, or even a week. most interests change with time, I lose interest in a topic very fast, and gain interest in another topic just as quickly. No good recommender system should be based off a reading of my "personality", whatever that may be - the most stable aspects of my personality, even if they can be divined from my viewing history, say little as to what I would be interested in watching next.

ryanbrunner 9y ago
I think that's a fair point, and I wouldn't expect a video I watched 10 years ago to factor in very heavily on what I'm seeing today. But at least in my experience, it doesn't appear that the engine takes anything that happened more than a few days ago into account. As an example: I watched a few episodes of Penn and Teller: Fool Us yesterday. I hadn't really watched it before, and while I like Penn and Teller in general, I don't remember watching them all that much on YouTube prior to yesterday (I'm sure at some point I had watched a video or two, but not more so than anything else I stumbled on.) Today, 12 of the top 30 videos on my YouTube home page are specifically Penn and Teller: Fool Us. Not magic in general, not Penn and Teller in general, but specifically that show. That seems like the very recent past is way overrepresented.

asah 9y ago

Sounds like an opportunity: deeper recommendations

Siecje 9y ago

Why are so many videos I have already seen? I guess people re-watch them, or show other people "Hey have you seen this". But for me it is just silly.

tragic 9y ago
Well, it sometimes makes sense. I, and many others, use YouTube as a music streaming service. Most people listen to most songs they like more than once. I dare say yt has gotten a good amount of ad revenue out of me listening to Darren Emerson's dub extravaganza mix of black sky by Shakespeare's sister, which is always in the recommendation panel for some reason...

jitix 9y ago

I concur that.. these days I have to clear my youtube history every few weeks to prevent it from spamming my page (and my fucking TV!) with suggestions related to random videos I watched over a short period of time. The videos I liked over the last 7-8 years seem to carry less weight. I wish there was a way to tune these behavior.

elif 9y ago

yeah, but i get the impression history is retained and utilized. If i watch 2-3 how-to videos i start getting how-to videos that are similar to my history, not just random how-to. then if i switch to skateboarding, i get skateboarding videos similar to my history. This seems like a good algorithm to me, as when i'm watching skateboard videos with my friends, I don't want "how to caulk tile joints" to show up

c3534l 9y ago

Part of that trend is because recommendation algorithms aren't all that interested in making recommendations anymore. They're interested in getting sales or views. To do this, they use dumber algorithms that are easier to understand ("people who bought this also bought...") and over-value recency. They're not helping you find new content, they're trying to prolong the time you're on youtube.

revmoo 9y ago
I have been paid to write an algorithm like this. It matched you to relevant content, but then a manually configured weighting table would skew results to more popular sources. It went as far as taking into account the number of leads we had sent each partner that month as a percentage of their quota

cameldrv 9y ago

The problem is the economics of the Internet today. Most sites are ad-funded. They need to maximize pageviews and time on site. The recommender is a huge part of accomplishing that, and it simply won't be tuned to any metric other than maximizing revenue. The solution would be to reskin popular sites with recommenders that had other objectives, such as retrospective satisfaction with time spent. Unfortunately sites know that if they give up control of the UI through an API that is open, they will lose money when people do things like this. I really think we're entering a crisis here where sites and apps that are engineered to maximize corporate metrics are leading people down horrible paths of addiction, and psychic stress as they spend their mental energy resisting temptations constantly thrown at them.

wruza 9y ago
They can at least do right recommendations if adblock detected.
- eat_veggies 9y ago
  That incentivizes using adblockers though, and given that ads are pretty much YouTube's entire business model, that would be nice for you but terrible for the business. However, they do charge money per month for YouTube Red which removes ads, and a better recommendation system for Red subscribers might encourage people to buy it.
phs318u 9y ago
Thought just occurred: would I be willing to pay a subscription to have the recommender tuned to remove revenue maximisation and site-addiction maximisation? Would anyone? I've made plenty of "remove ads" in-app purchases on my phone. This isn't too different. And it might actually result in a truly useful experience.
- dandare 9y ago
  There may be public relations problem - users these days understand that ads pay the bills and don't see them as a moral compromise but try to explain to your users that they can pay premium to get relevant recommendations instead of "spam".

chiefalchemist 9y ago

It's not just over tuning, but finding me things I might have missed. Not necessarily popular things, but thinks that appeal to me. For example, I get emails from Pocket "You saved a popular article..." And I think "Who cares?" Don't tell me what I know, tell me what I missed. YT is similar. It recommends things I've watched. I'm looking for new and interesting and I'm getting yesterday's news? That doesn't excite me.

freeflight 9y ago

I've moved pretty much all my music listening to YouTube due to simple convenience of easily being able to generate whole genre playlists based on one song. But because the playlists are dynamic, YouTube keeps on shoving songs from other playlists (and genres) into each other, trying to generate a "perfect playlist" and in the process making all the playlists sound very similar with no more genre distinctions except for the first couple of songs.

escribmac 9y ago

I agree. I've been reluctant to click amazon links because I know ads will follow me around for weeks if I look at a single product.