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Fair Trending: Objectively-Ranked Trending YouTube Videos

120 points by lowe 8y ago

therein 8y ago
This is a great idea. I also wanted to create a platform like this one however allow people to sync their list of subscribed channels from YouTube. As you know, the subscriptions feed is now optimized on YouTube and not all new content from your subscribed channels find their way into your feed anymore. This platform that I was thinking would basically bring that back, however under a different domain with a better UI. Anyone interested? Let's build it together. Or just bring that feature into this site. I just want a feed that's chronological and non-optimized.
- ccdsacc 8y ago
  My subscriber feed is chronological actually. Are you sure yours is not?
- halflings 8y ago
  > As you know, the subscriptions feed is now optimized on YouTube and not all new content from your subscribed channels find their way into your feed anymore. Source? Wasn't that just an experiment?
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Indeed, there's a separate feed for subscriptions and it works exactly as expected. I don't see the issue here.
- jsvcnk 8y ago
  I made a simple version of this as a command line program that can subscribe to channels and generate a html page with chronological video thumbnail links, no server/syncing though : https://github.com/dxwc/vidlist https://github.com/dxwc/vidlist
ikeboy 8y ago
There's no music videos, which usually account for many trending videos. If you want objective ranking, look at kworb lists. E.g. https://kworb.net/youtube/ https://kworb.net/youtube/
the_cat_kittles 8y ago
im always wondering how to quantify the self reinforcing aspects of popular videos. also it seems like score decay based on time should be completely controlled by the user
- simongr3dal 8y ago
  As I understand it, the formula is designed to keep a trending video around on their list for roughly a day. It would be interesting so see a list which optimised for showing videos (of any age) with accelerating views, and had a stronger decay over time, so you could see what is trending right now, but it might be heavily biased by the very recent uploads from popular creators.
clux 8y ago
Not sure if it helps much. It still looks like the same clickbaity garbage that's in my regular trending tab.
- comesee 8y ago
  Though it seems to be a different list of clickbaity garbage from https://m.youtube.com/feed/trending https://m.youtube.com/feed/trending which is sort of interesting.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    I’m reasonably sure the YouTube one shows old stuff if it’s currently popular. Which I’d assume is what you’d want. There’s nothing is even consider watching on the “Fair trending” one; I can see myself watching one or two things off the YouTube one if I was very bored.
    - comesee 8y ago
      I used the filter on the site and I watched a view of these videos https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msce=0 https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msc...
- gniv 8y ago
  I think it's worse for me, based on the current set. The official trending page has a few videos that I'd like to watch, including two from my subscriptions. But the fairtrending page has nothing I am interested in.
- Micoloth 8y ago
  Yes, here in my location too. Pretty much the same complete trash Looks like AI recommendations did have a point all along lol
simongr3dal 8y ago
From their about page: "A simple way to understand this formula is that a video loses a point every 12 hours and gains a point every time it grows by 10x. In other words, a video's score will not change if its view count grows by 10x in 12 hours. These constants were tuned to keep popular videos around for about a day." It seems like pretty flawed idea, they base their ranking on video views and age, but the video views are a result of the non-"Objectively-Ranked" videos on YouTube itself. I think the page itself shows those results pretty clearly, it's chock full of videos with thumbnails designed to draw peoples eyes as well as text and titles designed to raise questions and imply drama in order to entice people to click. That might be the wanted result, but I don't see how that is much different from the official Youtube trending page, except this one isn't localised/customised for your specific country.
- yorwba 8y ago
  > except this one isn't localised/customised for your specific country. It is. I get results in German. (And yes, they're all clickbait I'd never watch.)
  - simongr3dal 8y ago
    I see, there's a language filter up top must've missed it the first time around.
exabrial 8y ago
I think it's funny during Christmas and Easter, thousands of sermons and positive Christian videos are posted to YouTube but do not warrant a special response from Google, despite Christians being a large user base. Google is of course free to do as they wish with their platform and promote whatever they want, it's their choice and they own it. What I dislike is they advertise it as sort of free speech platform but rankings are intrinsically geared towards special interests.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  If you watch lots of Christian stuff, YouTube will absolutely suggest more of it to you.
- chillacy 8y ago
  I wasn’t aware YouTube positions itself as a “free speech platform”. In fact that just sounds like a dog whistle for online harassment.
- che_shirecat 8y ago
  quantity != virality. Christmas and Easter sermons are definitely not viral material. Plus, google is definitely not going to go out of their way to push Christian videos on people haha.
- duskwuff 8y ago
  Probably because those videos don't actually drive much engagement. Most sermon videos -- for example -- tend to be relatively slow-paced, lightly edited (if at all), and do not use any visuals beyond a fixed camera on the speaker. All of these factors are poison to engagement, even for users who might otherwise be interested in the content.
  - ramblerouser 8y ago
    Do you know how many views Easter sermons get, or are you just assuming it's not much? I would be quite surprised if the youtube algorithm is looking at video editing style.
comesee 8y ago
The default feed is pretty clickbaity but I filtered to only show the technology category and it's not terrible https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msce=0 https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msc...
- rsynnott 8y ago
  That still looks fairly terrible. I think I prefer Google’s approach...
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  OT but I sometimes get the impression I'm the only person in the world who can't stand "Linus Tech Tips". The guy just grates on me and I get the distinct impression he genuinely doesn't know what he's talking about. I guess the fact that he's in this list and therefore one of the most popular channels on YouTube would explain why he keeps appearing in my feed despite my unsubscription and continued lack of interest, however.
isuckatcoding 8y ago
So much youtuber celebrity garbage
jamesfmilne 8y ago
The initial page it showed me was a trainwreck of absolute garbage. I think they need to go and work on their sums a bit more.
- nadont8 8y ago
  Because people watch absolute garbage. There's no algorithmic solution to that.
  - notatoad 8y ago
    there is an alogorithmic solution - it's the one youtube uses for their trending page, which is subjectively far superior to this "objective" and "fair" listing.
    - hoseja 8y ago
      Do you think the Youtube trending page isn't hand-polished?
  - slig 8y ago
    There is. After logging in and liking dozens of videos, their algorithm will come up with some pretty decent recommendations, in my experience.
- Buge 8y ago
  >I think they need to go and work on their sums a bit more. What does this mean? Are you saying Youtube needs to improve, Fair Trending needs to improve, or the viewers need to improve?
bayesian_horse 8y ago
Sometimes you better not try to find out why something is trending. For example the "Toad" incident recently.
KirinDave 8y ago
I was not expecting the truth to be SO much worse than the algorithmically provided view. I'm sold on algorithmic timelines now. That Youtube is awful. People are awful. Fortnite Battle Royale is awful. I don't want to see any of those.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  Shows how low quality society is now.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    Now, and always. It’s not like bear baiting and midget shows were ever popular because the average person has refined tastes.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    Hardly. Go back and read old newspapers. They were all awful. This myth that societal culture is on the decline is just a failure to understand that time is a polarizing filter to remove the glare of bullshit.
  - rahulkapil 8y ago
    Not really. Centralized recommendations dont provide value to majority of clusters in the network.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Is it time for someone to wheel out that quote again... Aristotle, was it?
    - KirinDave 8y ago
      I may steal this. This insult is so sizzlingly hot and sharp it carbonized my phone and then cut it in half, and I love it.
- GW150914 8y ago
  What I hate about the algorithm is that I feel it’s constantly nudging me towards “that” youtube. It feels like someone pulling on your sleeve and saying, “You know how you watched five minutes of the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer? Maybe you’d like a dozen recommendations of GG conspiracy material and tweens screaming at FortNite? And hey, remember that time you watched a living historian cook a meal from the 1800’s? Well, here’s some dude trying to eat a dozen hot wings. You like food stuff right? RIGHT?!” It’s still better than the pure vomit on this fair site, but it could be soooooop much better if it didn’t try to maximize engagement as the primary goal.
everdrive 8y ago
Everyone here is clearly having the same experience. However much we dislike algorithmic sorting, it's clear that the most popular videos on Youtube are absolutely horrible.
- larl 8y ago
  * by this metric
- threatofrain 8y ago
  Not everything has to be shared, but if people say that YouTube ought be broad enough for everyone, then one is in a sense sharing a space with 12 year old kids. Fortnite is probably the #1 streamed game at the moment.
mung 8y ago
Suppressing the urge to Photoshop all of those thumbnails to Fito's video screen in idiocracy as a reply.
mooman219 8y ago
I worked on content recommendation for a bit while I was at Microsoft. People click on low quality articles, spend a lot of time reading said articles, then seek out similar or lower quality articles containing the same named entities. If you recommended a variety of content to those people, they'd most frequently pick articles of equal or lesser quality about named entities they just read. This is really kind of saddening, but your best bet really is just personalizing on as many user metrics as you can collect to best serve the people who like clickbait as well as the people who are looking for higher quality articles. Not really relevant, but funny enough, if you prioritize article quality, popular named entities, how relevant those entities are to the article, engagement, and article age, you end up with earnings reports.
ramblerouser 8y ago
Pewdiepie has the #1 spot on fairtrending and is no where on Youtube's trending. Ellen Degeneres and Jimmy Falon are you Youtube trending but nowhere on fairtrending. "Elitist corperate control over mass media is great because I don't like what normal people do." -people in this hackernews thread
- anonytrary 8y ago
  > "Elitist corperate control over mass media is great because I don't like what normal people do." -people in this hackernews thread This seems blown out of proportion. "I don't like what normal people do, so I will probably not look at trending to find content" is what most people are saying.
  - ramblerouser 8y ago
    Fairtrending isn't about recommending stuff you personally are interested in. It's designed to acurately report what is actually popular and not just being promoted by Youtube. I think that went over the head of the people complaining that their personalized recommendations are more interesting to them.
    - anonytrary 8y ago
      I think everyone gets that trending isn't personalized. It's possible that a lot of people have no interest in what is objectively trending, and defer to personalized subscriptions and other feeds. I'd imagine that most people are interested in what is trending (otherwise, it wouldn't really be trending), but HN is hardly a realistic sample of most people, so you can expect people here to be surprised that X, Y and Z are trending over the world.
- oliv__ 8y ago
  Define normal
- GW150914 8y ago
  Pewdiepie has the #1 spot on fairtrending and is no where on Youtube's trending. Ellen Degeneres and Jimmy Falon are you Youtube trending but nowhere on fairtrending. "Elitist corperate control over mass media is great because I don't like what normal people do." -people in this hackernews thread What about those of us who would rather stick a fork in our eye than watch PewDiePie, Degeneres, or Fallon? I’m not seeing the praise for what you’re calling “elitist corporate control,” so much as despair that the supposedly fair option is at least as hideous as the rigged option. Beyond that if we define normal as in Normal Distribution, then who’s fault is it if you expected to find the middle of that distribution on a site called Hacker News? Most people would be bored out of their skin on this site and that’s fine, just as it’s fine for a subset of the population with shared interests to enjoy it. If you want normal as in average, you’re barking up the wrong tree, and FaceBook, Instagram, and the rest have you covered. If you’re seeing a lot of praise for the YT algorithm, rather than dislike of both algorithm and lack of curation, I must be missing it and you could maybe point it out?
foxfired 8y ago
"Number of views in the video" was an actual problem for youtube because people gamed the algorithm by inflating views. Now "time spent watching the video" is added to confirm the view. I understand this data is not easily accessible to a third party but it would certainly improve this algorithm. Edit 1: If I open YouTube and the Fair trending videos were presented to me, I would probably never use YouTube again. Edit 2: I realize that I never click on the trending tab on youtube. I take back Edit 1, I'll just never click on the trending tab again.
- ramblerouser 8y ago
  Have you looked at the front page of youtube after clearing your cookies? Its not more high brow than fairtrending. The point is that media corperations are paying Youtube for placement and Youtube is hiding non-advertiser friendly content.
tropo 8y ago
You really have to pick a category. For example, "News & Politics" is decent. Of course, an alternate ranking does nothing to fix the problem of videos that have simply been banned by YouTube. Lots of good stuff is just missing now. Freedom of speech: tearing out a man's tongue doesn't prove him wrong, but it does prove that you fear his message and it strongly suggests that his message might be correct.
- comesee 8y ago
  Yeah the education category is alright https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=27&tag=&msce=0 https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=27&tag=&msc...
- toofy 8y ago
  > ...but it does prove that you fear his message and it strongly suggests that his message might be correct. I find it strange that one would believe this A) means people are scared, and B) means the message is more likely to be correct. For example, if we were to watch two random idiots arguing or "debating" over a complex and highly nuanced topic, if neither of these "debaters" has any expertise or really any understanding of the wider issues which may need to be considered, its incredibly unlikely either of these people will come to anything close to the "correct" answers. While one of them may make more convincing arguments, this means very little. If my car mechanic makes a convincing argument,links me to a bunch of youtube videos, and official looking webpages which all tell me I should use homeopathic medicine and the guy I'm sitting next to me simply says "Nah, doctors are totally way better, dude." Neither of those two people are trained in medicine, but should I listen to the mechanic because his argument was more convincing? No, of course not. Having an innate ability to use Sophistry absolutely does not indicate whether or not their position should be trusted. And refusing to engage with a Sophist is in no way an indication of being fearful of their message. It's so weird when people believe "debate me bro, a random idiot, or you're wrong and I'm correct." is in any way a rational conclusion to make.
  - tropo 8y ago
    That is a different situation. Nobody is banning the advocate of homeopathic medicine. YouTube actually bans videos. They leave up plenty of incorrect things that are nonthreatening, so correctness is clearly not the determining factor. This is not a matter of refusing to debate. It is a matter of refusing to let alternative opinions exist at all.
sbuttgereit 8y ago
OK... opinion post here... hell with that... rant here. I have to say the whole notion of "trending" I find ridiculous, and even a bit offensive. That somehow because a zillion people find something interesting, that I should, too, makes clear that the best we've done in filtering is assume people are sheep and need to be "fed" as such. Even with the targeted suggestions they do when they look at my viewing history (and other history I'm sure), it's so incredibly ham-fisted I just want to shout, "hey maybe you should spend less time getting your AI to beat Go champions and more time getting it actually make useful and relevant recommendations that just maybe you can dispose of that 'trending' shit you're always foisting on everyone." (Of course, if Google actually got newer versions of the Youtube app to just work correctly with their Chromecast, I'd take that as progress). Yeah, yeah, I know that they aren't trying to get the best matched content to me in the first place... just that which I might swallow and they can get the biggest bang for their investment... but the value proposition gets too diminished and I'm gone.... emphasis on stupidity such as "trending" pushes me to look at alternatives with some frequency. I've already left Twitter and Facebook due to this pushing trends stuff, Google is on the edge. Of course, maybe I'm the outlier and I should just invest in Google, Twitter, Facebook, oh yeah and their traditional equivalents of "Us", "People", and the "National Enquirer" since that's where the masses apparently are. The only trending I'd be interested in at all would be "trending" amongst a group of people whom I could actively curate in a list based on my tastes and interests and... importantly... theirs. It's clear to me that I can't outsource that curation just yet. Finally... the front page of Hacker News is obviously just a big "trending" list. I have a higher affinity with the audience here, but still find about 60% - 70% of the front page content to be of zero interest and the comments hit much less; The 30% - 40% I come back for clearly has a high value to me, nonetheless. Between a tagging filter and having the ability to select a list of certain HN users to allow undue influence the results that I see when I come to the site would make it much, much better experience. (And I probably wouldn't be baited to post crap like this). In truth, I don't actually use the Hacker News homepage directly and instead start my journey at http://hn.elijames.org/ http://hn.elijames.org/
- ramblerouser 8y ago
  I totally agree that popular stuff is beneath us techno wizards, but thats not the point of fairtrending. The magic of social media is that corperate executives and media conglomerates don't get to pick what goes to the top. The users do. That's why Facebook 'curating' the trending news feed was so messed up. The whole point of trending is to see what actual real people are interested in, not just what a dozen editors in a backroom want you to see.
tehwebguy 8y ago
FYI YouTube will disable their API access as soon as the right team notices this. Go on, ask me how I know.
- quartzkilla 8y ago
  I'll bite
- miduil 8y ago
  How do you know?
mujoco 8y ago
It seems like they're doing something similar to how Reddit's "hot" algorithm reportedly works. As of 2015, that was supposedly like: log(upVotes - downVotes) - (hoursOld / 12.5), according to https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-work-ef111e33d0d9 https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo.... Fair Trending basically differs just in the log() part, substituting (fractionUpVotes * views) for (upVotes - downVotes). This could change the ranking if a lot of people view without voting either way.
jhallenworld 8y ago
I don't care about the popular crap on YouTube. I do care about the tiny subset of YouTube which is relevant to my interests. YouTube should accurately recommend related content, but does a terrible job, and is apparently getting worse. This is noticed by the obscure content creators, here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA&t=1s
erik_landerholm 8y ago
Happy to say I’ve never even seen videos of these type.
convery 8y ago
Seems to have issues when filtering by language. Pretty sure the top 5 shouldn't be 6 days old with < 100 views. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/b1OuV51.png https://i.imgur.com/b1OuV51.png
larl 8y ago
This is actually terrifying.
miduil 8y ago
If you haven't noticed, YouTube's ranking mechanisms became more "fraudulent" at least in the recent months. So besides having a service that provides un-editorialized blackbox algorithm rankings, this service might also provide a view to purposefully/bugged excluded content. An example of how bad it is, they've started (on purpose or not) removing videos of uploaders that aren't taking part of the YouTube monetarization + have a Patreon link in their description. [0][1] I'd expect/hope that such practice would be suit in EU courts for unfair competition. I wonder how "Fair Trending" implemented their technology, if they are using official YouTube APIs and if Alphabet is going to kill this service once it gains traction? Their about [2] page doesn't answer the "how do we get to the data?". [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005682 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA [2]: https://www.fairtrending.com/about?lang=en https://www.fairtrending.com/about?lang=en

120 points by lowe 8y ago

This is a great idea. I also wanted to create a platform like this one however allow people to sync their list of subscribed channels from YouTube. As you know, the subscriptions feed is now optimized on YouTube and not all new content from your subscribed channels find their way into your feed anymore. This platform that I was thinking would basically bring that back, however under a different domain with a better UI. Anyone interested? Let's build it together. Or just bring that feature into this site. I just want a feed that's chronological and non-optimized.

ccdsacc 8y ago
My subscriber feed is chronological actually. Are you sure yours is not?
halflings 8y ago
> As you know, the subscriptions feed is now optimized on YouTube and not all new content from your subscribed channels find their way into your feed anymore. Source? Wasn't that just an experiment?
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Indeed, there's a separate feed for subscriptions and it works exactly as expected. I don't see the issue here.
jsvcnk 8y ago
I made a simple version of this as a command line program that can subscribe to channels and generate a html page with chronological video thumbnail links, no server/syncing though : https://github.com/dxwc/vidlist https://github.com/dxwc/vidlist

ikeboy 8y ago

There's no music videos, which usually account for many trending videos. If you want objective ranking, look at kworb lists. E.g. https://kworb.net/youtube/ https://kworb.net/youtube/

the_cat_kittles 8y ago

im always wondering how to quantify the self reinforcing aspects of popular videos. also it seems like score decay based on time should be completely controlled by the user

simongr3dal 8y ago
As I understand it, the formula is designed to keep a trending video around on their list for roughly a day. It would be interesting so see a list which optimised for showing videos (of any age) with accelerating views, and had a stronger decay over time, so you could see what is trending right now, but it might be heavily biased by the very recent uploads from popular creators.

clux 8y ago

Not sure if it helps much. It still looks like the same clickbaity garbage that's in my regular trending tab.

comesee 8y ago
Though it seems to be a different list of clickbaity garbage from https://m.youtube.com/feed/trending https://m.youtube.com/feed/trending which is sort of interesting.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  I’m reasonably sure the YouTube one shows old stuff if it’s currently popular. Which I’d assume is what you’d want. There’s nothing is even consider watching on the “Fair trending” one; I can see myself watching one or two things off the YouTube one if I was very bored.
  - comesee 8y ago
    I used the filter on the site and I watched a view of these videos https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msce=0 https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msc...
gniv 8y ago
I think it's worse for me, based on the current set. The official trending page has a few videos that I'd like to watch, including two from my subscriptions. But the fairtrending page has nothing I am interested in.
Micoloth 8y ago
Yes, here in my location too. Pretty much the same complete trash Looks like AI recommendations did have a point all along lol

simongr3dal 8y ago

From their about page: "A simple way to understand this formula is that a video loses a point every 12 hours and gains a point every time it grows by 10x. In other words, a video's score will not change if its view count grows by 10x in 12 hours. These constants were tuned to keep popular videos around for about a day." It seems like pretty flawed idea, they base their ranking on video views and age, but the video views are a result of the non-"Objectively-Ranked" videos on YouTube itself. I think the page itself shows those results pretty clearly, it's chock full of videos with thumbnails designed to draw peoples eyes as well as text and titles designed to raise questions and imply drama in order to entice people to click. That might be the wanted result, but I don't see how that is much different from the official Youtube trending page, except this one isn't localised/customised for your specific country.

yorwba 8y ago
> except this one isn't localised/customised for your specific country. It is. I get results in German. (And yes, they're all clickbait I'd never watch.)
- simongr3dal 8y ago
  I see, there's a language filter up top must've missed it the first time around.

exabrial 8y ago

I think it's funny during Christmas and Easter, thousands of sermons and positive Christian videos are posted to YouTube but do not warrant a special response from Google, despite Christians being a large user base. Google is of course free to do as they wish with their platform and promote whatever they want, it's their choice and they own it. What I dislike is they advertise it as sort of free speech platform but rankings are intrinsically geared towards special interests.

rsynnott 8y ago
If you watch lots of Christian stuff, YouTube will absolutely suggest more of it to you.
chillacy 8y ago
I wasn’t aware YouTube positions itself as a “free speech platform”. In fact that just sounds like a dog whistle for online harassment.
che_shirecat 8y ago
quantity != virality. Christmas and Easter sermons are definitely not viral material. Plus, google is definitely not going to go out of their way to push Christian videos on people haha.
duskwuff 8y ago
Probably because those videos don't actually drive much engagement. Most sermon videos -- for example -- tend to be relatively slow-paced, lightly edited (if at all), and do not use any visuals beyond a fixed camera on the speaker. All of these factors are poison to engagement, even for users who might otherwise be interested in the content.
- ramblerouser 8y ago
  Do you know how many views Easter sermons get, or are you just assuming it's not much? I would be quite surprised if the youtube algorithm is looking at video editing style.

comesee 8y ago

The default feed is pretty clickbaity but I filtered to only show the technology category and it's not terrible https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msce=0 https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msc...

rsynnott 8y ago
That still looks fairly terrible. I think I prefer Google’s approach...
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
OT but I sometimes get the impression I'm the only person in the world who can't stand "Linus Tech Tips". The guy just grates on me and I get the distinct impression he genuinely doesn't know what he's talking about. I guess the fact that he's in this list and therefore one of the most popular channels on YouTube would explain why he keeps appearing in my feed despite my unsubscription and continued lack of interest, however.

isuckatcoding 8y ago

So much youtuber celebrity garbage

jamesfmilne 8y ago

The initial page it showed me was a trainwreck of absolute garbage. I think they need to go and work on their sums a bit more.

nadont8 8y ago
Because people watch absolute garbage. There's no algorithmic solution to that.
- notatoad 8y ago
  there is an alogorithmic solution - it's the one youtube uses for their trending page, which is subjectively far superior to this "objective" and "fair" listing.
  - hoseja 8y ago
    Do you think the Youtube trending page isn't hand-polished?
- slig 8y ago
  There is. After logging in and liking dozens of videos, their algorithm will come up with some pretty decent recommendations, in my experience.
Buge 8y ago
>I think they need to go and work on their sums a bit more. What does this mean? Are you saying Youtube needs to improve, Fair Trending needs to improve, or the viewers need to improve?

bayesian_horse 8y ago

Sometimes you better not try to find out why something is trending. For example the "Toad" incident recently.

KirinDave 8y ago

I was not expecting the truth to be SO much worse than the algorithmically provided view. I'm sold on algorithmic timelines now. That Youtube is awful. People are awful. Fortnite Battle Royale is awful. I don't want to see any of those.

prolikewh0a 8y ago
Shows how low quality society is now.
- GW150914 8y ago
  Now, and always. It’s not like bear baiting and midget shows were ever popular because the average person has refined tastes.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  Hardly. Go back and read old newspapers. They were all awful. This myth that societal culture is on the decline is just a failure to understand that time is a polarizing filter to remove the glare of bullshit.
- rahulkapil 8y ago
  Not really. Centralized recommendations dont provide value to majority of clusters in the network.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Is it time for someone to wheel out that quote again... Aristotle, was it?
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    I may steal this. This insult is so sizzlingly hot and sharp it carbonized my phone and then cut it in half, and I love it.
GW150914 8y ago
What I hate about the algorithm is that I feel it’s constantly nudging me towards “that” youtube. It feels like someone pulling on your sleeve and saying, “You know how you watched five minutes of the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer? Maybe you’d like a dozen recommendations of GG conspiracy material and tweens screaming at FortNite? And hey, remember that time you watched a living historian cook a meal from the 1800’s? Well, here’s some dude trying to eat a dozen hot wings. You like food stuff right? RIGHT?!” It’s still better than the pure vomit on this fair site, but it could be soooooop much better if it didn’t try to maximize engagement as the primary goal.

everdrive 8y ago

Everyone here is clearly having the same experience. However much we dislike algorithmic sorting, it's clear that the most popular videos on Youtube are absolutely horrible.

larl 8y ago
* by this metric
threatofrain 8y ago
Not everything has to be shared, but if people say that YouTube ought be broad enough for everyone, then one is in a sense sharing a space with 12 year old kids. Fortnite is probably the #1 streamed game at the moment.

mung 8y ago

Suppressing the urge to Photoshop all of those thumbnails to Fito's video screen in idiocracy as a reply.

mooman219 8y ago

I worked on content recommendation for a bit while I was at Microsoft. People click on low quality articles, spend a lot of time reading said articles, then seek out similar or lower quality articles containing the same named entities. If you recommended a variety of content to those people, they'd most frequently pick articles of equal or lesser quality about named entities they just read. This is really kind of saddening, but your best bet really is just personalizing on as many user metrics as you can collect to best serve the people who like clickbait as well as the people who are looking for higher quality articles. Not really relevant, but funny enough, if you prioritize article quality, popular named entities, how relevant those entities are to the article, engagement, and article age, you end up with earnings reports.

ramblerouser 8y ago

Pewdiepie has the #1 spot on fairtrending and is no where on Youtube's trending. Ellen Degeneres and Jimmy Falon are you Youtube trending but nowhere on fairtrending. "Elitist corperate control over mass media is great because I don't like what normal people do." -people in this hackernews thread

anonytrary 8y ago
> "Elitist corperate control over mass media is great because I don't like what normal people do." -people in this hackernews thread This seems blown out of proportion. "I don't like what normal people do, so I will probably not look at trending to find content" is what most people are saying.
- ramblerouser 8y ago
  Fairtrending isn't about recommending stuff you personally are interested in. It's designed to acurately report what is actually popular and not just being promoted by Youtube. I think that went over the head of the people complaining that their personalized recommendations are more interesting to them.
  - anonytrary 8y ago
    I think everyone gets that trending isn't personalized. It's possible that a lot of people have no interest in what is objectively trending, and defer to personalized subscriptions and other feeds. I'd imagine that most people are interested in what is trending (otherwise, it wouldn't really be trending), but HN is hardly a realistic sample of most people, so you can expect people here to be surprised that X, Y and Z are trending over the world.
oliv__ 8y ago
Define normal
GW150914 8y ago
Pewdiepie has the #1 spot on fairtrending and is no where on Youtube's trending. Ellen Degeneres and Jimmy Falon are you Youtube trending but nowhere on fairtrending. "Elitist corperate control over mass media is great because I don't like what normal people do." -people in this hackernews thread What about those of us who would rather stick a fork in our eye than watch PewDiePie, Degeneres, or Fallon? I’m not seeing the praise for what you’re calling “elitist corporate control,” so much as despair that the supposedly fair option is at least as hideous as the rigged option. Beyond that if we define normal as in Normal Distribution, then who’s fault is it if you expected to find the middle of that distribution on a site called Hacker News? Most people would be bored out of their skin on this site and that’s fine, just as it’s fine for a subset of the population with shared interests to enjoy it. If you want normal as in average, you’re barking up the wrong tree, and FaceBook, Instagram, and the rest have you covered. If you’re seeing a lot of praise for the YT algorithm, rather than dislike of both algorithm and lack of curation, I must be missing it and you could maybe point it out?

foxfired 8y ago

"Number of views in the video" was an actual problem for youtube because people gamed the algorithm by inflating views. Now "time spent watching the video" is added to confirm the view. I understand this data is not easily accessible to a third party but it would certainly improve this algorithm. Edit 1: If I open YouTube and the Fair trending videos were presented to me, I would probably never use YouTube again. Edit 2: I realize that I never click on the trending tab on youtube. I take back Edit 1, I'll just never click on the trending tab again.

ramblerouser 8y ago
Have you looked at the front page of youtube after clearing your cookies? Its not more high brow than fairtrending. The point is that media corperations are paying Youtube for placement and Youtube is hiding non-advertiser friendly content.

tropo 8y ago

You really have to pick a category. For example, "News & Politics" is decent. Of course, an alternate ranking does nothing to fix the problem of videos that have simply been banned by YouTube. Lots of good stuff is just missing now. Freedom of speech: tearing out a man's tongue doesn't prove him wrong, but it does prove that you fear his message and it strongly suggests that his message might be correct.

comesee 8y ago
Yeah the education category is alright https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=27&tag=&msce=0 https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=27&tag=&msc...
toofy 8y ago
> ...but it does prove that you fear his message and it strongly suggests that his message might be correct. I find it strange that one would believe this A) means people are scared, and B) means the message is more likely to be correct. For example, if we were to watch two random idiots arguing or "debating" over a complex and highly nuanced topic, if neither of these "debaters" has any expertise or really any understanding of the wider issues which may need to be considered, its incredibly unlikely either of these people will come to anything close to the "correct" answers. While one of them may make more convincing arguments, this means very little. If my car mechanic makes a convincing argument,links me to a bunch of youtube videos, and official looking webpages which all tell me I should use homeopathic medicine and the guy I'm sitting next to me simply says "Nah, doctors are totally way better, dude." Neither of those two people are trained in medicine, but should I listen to the mechanic because his argument was more convincing? No, of course not. Having an innate ability to use Sophistry absolutely does not indicate whether or not their position should be trusted. And refusing to engage with a Sophist is in no way an indication of being fearful of their message. It's so weird when people believe "debate me bro, a random idiot, or you're wrong and I'm correct." is in any way a rational conclusion to make.
- tropo 8y ago
  That is a different situation. Nobody is banning the advocate of homeopathic medicine. YouTube actually bans videos. They leave up plenty of incorrect things that are nonthreatening, so correctness is clearly not the determining factor. This is not a matter of refusing to debate. It is a matter of refusing to let alternative opinions exist at all.

sbuttgereit 8y ago

OK... opinion post here... hell with that... rant here. I have to say the whole notion of "trending" I find ridiculous, and even a bit offensive. That somehow because a zillion people find something interesting, that I should, too, makes clear that the best we've done in filtering is assume people are sheep and need to be "fed" as such. Even with the targeted suggestions they do when they look at my viewing history (and other history I'm sure), it's so incredibly ham-fisted I just want to shout, "hey maybe you should spend less time getting your AI to beat Go champions and more time getting it actually make useful and relevant recommendations that just maybe you can dispose of that 'trending' shit you're always foisting on everyone." (Of course, if Google actually got newer versions of the Youtube app to just work correctly with their Chromecast, I'd take that as progress). Yeah, yeah, I know that they aren't trying to get the best matched content to me in the first place... just that which I might swallow and they can get the biggest bang for their investment... but the value proposition gets too diminished and I'm gone.... emphasis on stupidity such as "trending" pushes me to look at alternatives with some frequency. I've already left Twitter and Facebook due to this pushing trends stuff, Google is on the edge. Of course, maybe I'm the outlier and I should just invest in Google, Twitter, Facebook, oh yeah and their traditional equivalents of "Us", "People", and the "National Enquirer" since that's where the masses apparently are. The only trending I'd be interested in at all would be "trending" amongst a group of people whom I could actively curate in a list based on my tastes and interests and... importantly... theirs. It's clear to me that I can't outsource that curation just yet. Finally... the front page of Hacker News is obviously just a big "trending" list. I have a higher affinity with the audience here, but still find about 60% - 70% of the front page content to be of zero interest and the comments hit much less; The 30% - 40% I come back for clearly has a high value to me, nonetheless. Between a tagging filter and having the ability to select a list of certain HN users to allow undue influence the results that I see when I come to the site would make it much, much better experience. (And I probably wouldn't be baited to post crap like this). In truth, I don't actually use the Hacker News homepage directly and instead start my journey at http://hn.elijames.org/ http://hn.elijames.org/

ramblerouser 8y ago
I totally agree that popular stuff is beneath us techno wizards, but thats not the point of fairtrending. The magic of social media is that corperate executives and media conglomerates don't get to pick what goes to the top. The users do. That's why Facebook 'curating' the trending news feed was so messed up. The whole point of trending is to see what actual real people are interested in, not just what a dozen editors in a backroom want you to see.

tehwebguy 8y ago

FYI YouTube will disable their API access as soon as the right team notices this. Go on, ask me how I know.

quartzkilla 8y ago
I'll bite
miduil 8y ago
How do you know?

mujoco 8y ago

It seems like they're doing something similar to how Reddit's "hot" algorithm reportedly works. As of 2015, that was supposedly like: log(upVotes - downVotes) - (hoursOld / 12.5), according to https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-work-ef111e33d0d9 https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo.... Fair Trending basically differs just in the log() part, substituting (fractionUpVotes * views) for (upVotes - downVotes). This could change the ranking if a lot of people view without voting either way.

jhallenworld 8y ago

I don't care about the popular crap on YouTube. I do care about the tiny subset of YouTube which is relevant to my interests. YouTube should accurately recommend related content, but does a terrible job, and is apparently getting worse. This is noticed by the obscure content creators, here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA&t=1s

erik_landerholm 8y ago

Happy to say I’ve never even seen videos of these type.

convery 8y ago

Seems to have issues when filtering by language. Pretty sure the top 5 shouldn't be 6 days old with < 100 views. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/b1OuV51.png https://i.imgur.com/b1OuV51.png

larl 8y ago

This is actually terrifying.

miduil 8y ago

If you haven't noticed, YouTube's ranking mechanisms became more "fraudulent" at least in the recent months. So besides having a service that provides un-editorialized blackbox algorithm rankings, this service might also provide a view to purposefully/bugged excluded content. An example of how bad it is, they've started (on purpose or not) removing videos of uploaders that aren't taking part of the YouTube monetarization + have a Patreon link in their description. [0][1] I'd expect/hope that such practice would be suit in EU courts for unfair competition. I wonder how "Fair Trending" implemented their technology, if they are using official YouTube APIs and if Alphabet is going to kill this service once it gains traction? Their about [2] page doesn't answer the "how do we get to the data?". [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005682 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA [2]: https://www.fairtrending.com/about?lang=en https://www.fairtrending.com/about?lang=en