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An ex-YouTube whistleblower on their recommendation engine

302 points by seapunk 8y ago

pizza 8y ago
Related ( https://twitter.com/math_rachel/status/1094041631211249664 https://twitter.com/math_rachel/status/1094041631211249664 ) Another good example of resisting the tyranny of metrics is Meetup trying to avoid a runaway feedback loop in its recommendation system, as described by @estola https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqoRzNhrTnQ* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqoRzNhrTnQ*
TheLuddite 8y ago
These companies are cancer...the soon we begin bombing them - the better.
paulsutter 8y ago
If it is written in PowerPoint, it's probably AI > "I worked on the AI that promoted them"
- softwaredoug 8y ago
  Using the term “AI” was also a big red flag that this person doesn’t know how the algorithm works. It’s not some sky net sentient thing trying to get us to watch more videos... it’s math and training data
Andre607 8y ago
Does anyone else find these kinds of Twitter threads incredibly hard to follow? It's very difficult to contextualize and adapt to reading these short incremental bursts of text or 'Twitter threads'. It always feels like important context and exposition is missing. I seem to understand the gist, that Youtube seems to have promoted flat earth videos disproportionately, but the 'whistleblower' aspect is not immediately apparent.
- okhuman 8y ago
  +1
- ericol 8y ago
  Couldn't agree more.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- RodericDay 8y ago
  I find it incredibly easy to follow. In fact, the thread on Twitter itself is even easier to read than this ThreaderApp link that some people demand. The incessant bloviating from people who refuse to learn how to use Twitter is far more annoying tbh, it's starting to sound like old people complaining about the music being too loud, and it always derails discussion.
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    I know how to read Twitter and yeah, this one is really hard to read. It's got all these numbers with slashes behind them scattered throughout. It's got a list of numbers with slashes in the middle. It's got random links. It's got the occasional sentence without punctuation It's just kind of a mess. I was a heavy user of Twitter for multiple years. I've pulled back on it lately and it's really amazing how much I don't miss the weird, telegraphic kind of writing it tends to encourage. It really bugs me that one of our major means of communication forces you to filter everything through tiny text boxes that only recently became big enough for a whole sentence, and strongly discourages taking time to actually consider the flow of an idea through multiple paragraphs.
    - StellarTabi 8y ago
      "This is why I can’t have conversations using Twitter" http://antirez.com/news/82 http://antirez.com/news/82 I can't see how people use Twitter for anything more than shouting into the ether at each other. It's just so messy and rambly if you try.
Laforet 8y ago
Can confirm, I've had flat earth stuff recommended to me after watching normal astronomy/rocketry videos (Vsauce, Scott Manley, etc), notwithstanding the fact I am also subscribed to several skeptic channels. The AI clearly wasn't able to distinguish context beyond a few keywords. This just adds to the general uselessness of the recommendation feature - I've seen that video five times, it's good but could you offer me something else?
- williamdclt 8y ago
  Honestly, "seen that video five times" sounds like a good heuristic for "this guy might want to watch that video". "I've already seen that video once" would not be. That being said, yeah the recommendation feature is just terrible
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    Unfortunately, out of the thousands of videos I've seen and the millions I don't want to see, every once in a while YouTube chooses one and really promotes the fuck out of it. The recommendation engine is awful for me. It doesn't make me want to spend time on YouTube. It's amazing that at the same time it seems to learn how to get people addicted.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  What if skeptics frequently watch flat earth videos because they enjoy the schadenfreude?
  - jstanley 8y ago
    I personally do this and have been occasionally annoyed that I can't find a particular flat earth video because all the results for it are about people debunking it, even if I get super specific with the search terms. I think YouTube have gone too far the other way.
    - colejohnson66 8y ago
S_A_P 8y ago
I’m becoming more and more frustrated with YouTube, because I have seen it take my stepson and my son and turn them in to bedridden sloths. Ok that was hyperbole but there is a whole new level of friction to get them to do anything around the house or even get out of the car when we arrive somewhere. Of course as their parent I impose boundaries on YouTube time. However I don’t think that YouTube has been a great influence on either of them. It’s a hard problem.
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  Probably not a YouTube problem, I suspect generations before would have said exactly the same thing of TV, Radio and even Books
- hi5eyes 8y ago
  my cousins kids will watch youtube videos on their phone/tablet while playing games on another phone/tablet or on another monitor screen while playing fortnite/pc games youtube is dangerous; just like netflix and facebook, they're designed to get people to stay on for as long as possible and obviously children are very susceptible to the design
  - dageshi 8y ago
    Is that any different to using a computer with the tv on for background noise? Or computer + podcast/audio book/radio? Seems like this is just an updated version of what people have been doing ever since the computer was invented.
    - mavhc 8y ago
      'Socrates famously warned against writing because it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.” He also advised that children can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, so parents should only allow them to hear wholesome allegories and not “improper” tales, lest their development go astray. ' 'The French statesman Malesherbes railed against the fashion for getting news from the printed page, arguing that it socially isolated readers and detracted from the spiritually uplifting group practice of getting news from the pulpit. A hundred years later, as literacy became essential and schools were widely introduced, the curmudgeons turned against education for being unnatural and a risk to mental health. An 1883 article in the weekly medical journal the Sanitarian argued that schools “exhaust the children’s brains and nervous systems with complex and multiple studies, and ruin their bodies by protracted imprisonment.” Meanwhile, excessive study was considered a leading cause of madness by the medical community.' ' In 1936, the music magazine the Gramophone reported that children had “developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker” and described how the radio programs were disturbing the balance of their excitable minds. '
xfitm3 8y ago
I support YouTube denouncing flat earthers because the science is clear to me: they're wrong. I think this will get slippery if they make similar tweaks for politics or social issues. This raises the question is it really YouTube's job to stop crazy? Where is the responsibility of the viewer?
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Why is it YouTube’s job to promote crazy? Why does the platform facilitate the branding of ignorance? Blaming the viewer is ridiculous — repetition of propaganda is dangerous and eventually changes people’s minds. It’s unfortunate that an amazing educational and entertainment resource is ruined by dumb policy — I don’t feel it’s appropriate for my son to use YouTube independently, as it always leads you to a rabbit hole of crazy through the recommendation engine. Always, because ignorance is engaging.
- jeromegv 8y ago
  The problem is not about Youtube stopping or not stopping the crazy. The problem is that: "flat earth videos were promoted ~10x more than round earth ones". They actually promoted the crazy quite a lot more than they promoted the real one. Keep the crazy videos on but jeez, stop promoting them above everything else.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    I think that if people want to watch flat earth videos, then the right thing to do is connect them to flat earth videos. I for one think flat earth videos are hilarious.
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      Yeah, this is part of the problem. Finding them "funny" and feeding the promotion machine. This is how we get teenagers having to vaccinate themselves because their parents were too stupid to fall for the antivax BS Because as inconsequential for everyday life (in general) if man stepped on the moon or if the Earth is a cylinder, it teaches people that "it's ok to ignore those nerds that say otherwise, whatever you believe that's ok" "Let's give stupidity a chance"? Sorry, no
ianai 8y ago
I think I’m more shocked by how willing people are to take fringe ideas seriously on the internet. I had a clear moment when new to the internet where I realized it should be taken with a grain of salt. But apparently many people never have that realization or they seemingly choose what they will believe.
- general8bitso 8y ago
  There are alot of mentally ill people in the US that can freely interact online. I am not sure of the solution, at all.
- jeromegv 8y ago
  I've seen it in the family. There seems to be a mentality among people from an older generation to think that if its published somewhere, then it must be true or close to be true. All their life, they were exposed to newspapers, magazines. Suddenly their habit changed and now they were getting news from the newspaper on the internet. But it was always true or close to be true, nothing was entirely made up. And then one day, they started getting news from friends on Whatsapp. Links from Youtube shared to them. There was never any change, it's still the internet giving them news. It never occurred to them that some what they were watching was entirely made up. I remember my wife's mom telling us that Steve Jobs launched the iPad on Dragons Den. Had no idea what she was talking about and then she showed us a doctored video of Steve Jobs at Dragons Dens, showing the iPad to everyone. She thought it was true. And we told her it was made up. And she couldn't understand why someone would spend time creating something false on the internet. She just couldn't understand it.
  - Krasnol 8y ago
    The really weird thing about this is, that the same people had a few years ago been talking "the internet" down a few years ago. Now the same people believe all kinds of crap from "the internet". I wonder if it may be our fault somehow by telling them that not everything on the internet is crap.
  - planktonite 8y ago
    > old people seem to believe things just because they are published Yeah, the dumb ones do. That’s not because of the generation they grew up in, it’s because there are dumb people in every generation. There are just as many people in the newest generations who believe anything that comes from the mouth of an authority figure.
KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
Yikes, while I understand there is some harm done by the AI leading people down "rabbit holes" I'd still rather have the AI stay independent than have humans manually biasing the results. The results of the AI reveals the worst instincts of humans but a manually tuned AI can be turned into a weapon for propaganda. That would be a worse result in every way. A naturally conspiracy theorist AI can be escaped and controlled on a per-person level by simply being a logically thinking person and controlling your feed and likes while a propaganda machine that serves a political purpose cannot. That really sucks.
- jeromegv 8y ago
  Someone coded the AI, the AI is biased by default. There is no such thing as an "independent" AI.
  - s_m_t 8y ago
    The danger is when the state or a political party or some other organizarion with the states levers of power controls the algorithm. It won't be flat earth videos that get deranked it will be anything that contradicts selling us trash and invading other countries. That warship wasn't actually bombed by the enemy, they probably didn't use those chemical weapons, why is our state department funding the same terrorists we were just fighting yesterday, actually those moderate rebels aren't so moderate will become the new flat earth.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
    That's not necessarily the case, the current trendy deep learning model has mostly black box AIs that are not manually tuned.
    - oliveshell 8y ago
      Here, however, it explicitly is the case. From the linked article: > “We designed YT’s AI to increase the time people spend online, because it leads to more ads.”
whiddershins 8y ago
We’ve all completely lost perspective. The engine wants people to spend as much time as possible on YouTube. Netflix’s wants the same, even though it’s not even ad based! Facebook wants the same. As infinitum. This is just addiction peddling. Nothing more. I think we have no idea how much damage this is doing to us. It’s as if someone invented cocaine for the first time and we have no social norms or legal framework to confront it. One thing you can never get back is time. It runs one way and as of this writing, we all have a finite amount of it. Conspiracy videos are the least of the problem.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Prior to YouTube, the internet and recommendation engines I used to spend hours in front of the TV. I could do this for days on end. I don't think I was alone. Now I spend the same amount of time in front of my computer only the content is 1,000X more informative and valuable (seriously, you don't want to know how many reruns of Facts of Life and Charles In Charge I've seen). Recommendations are simply a service that makes my life easier and potentially gives me something cool to watch (they don't usually work that good, but that's not the argument here).
  - ggggtez 8y ago
    I think it's an interesting comment. I wonder if the average person spends less time watching reruns compared to the 70s/80s/90s. There certainly was a cultural push to not be a "couch potato", and I wonder if we'll see that again with internet entertainment.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - oriolid 8y ago
    Interesting. I used to have Netflix and discover some interesting Youtube content from related videos, but now Netflix only recommends me Marvel films I don't want to watch and removes all interesting content and Youtube has terrible crap in "recommended for you" videos. On plus side, learning to play guitar has been at least as satisfying.
mbell 8y ago
> => Platforms that use AIs often get biased by tiny groups of hyper-active users. I don't doubt this but it's unclear to me how this is much different this is than many other systems. I think there are a _lot_ of systems that have an operating point defined by a small group of hyperactive users. e.g. The vast majority of twitter / reddit / probably even hacker news content is created by a tiny % of users. Even if you move past the content creation phase, curation is often also controlled by a small group of hyperactive users. e.g. The relatively small number of people that switch to the 'New' view on HN or reddit whom collectively decide what gets moved onto the front page where the masses will see it. It seems to me that an AI approach could be more 'fair' or 'democratic' in comparison to many of these existing systems in that it should consider the patterns of all users in some way, vs just relying on a small self selecting group to perform the same function. To wrap back to this YouTube situation, I think the deeper question here is why we seem to have so many people willing to believe anything they see on YouTube? More concerning I guess is the general idea that if we hide the offending content that is a 'solution'. It's really just putting a bandaid on a deeper problem and hoping it goes away.
nraynaud 8y ago
I watch a lot of YouTube, many university level courses that I absolutely do not understand, I hope to become an influential whale for education.
DisruptiveDave 8y ago
> There are 2 ways to fix vicious circles like with "flat earth" 1) make people spend more time on round earth videos 2) change the AI There's a 3rd. It's complex, difficult (to execute and prove), and hardly ever pushed. Put the onus on individuals to be realistic, honest, self aware, and diligent. Sure, it's not easy, not clean, and will likely lose more than it wins in the short term. But ignoring it completely is just...dangerous. Continuing to ask Daddy to change the world for you breeds less-than-desirable attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions. This concerns me more than any Internet video does.
- wtracy 8y ago
  First, a lot of the people watching these videos are high-functioning schizophrenics. Asking them to be more self-aware and diligent is like asking a paraplegic to spend more time walking. Second, how do you plan to do this? Put a banner on every Youtube page that says, "Don't trust this video"? What we're doing now clearly isn't working, and I don't know what you propose to do that we aren't already doing.
- ilovetux 8y ago
  I would say that your suggestion is the way things currently are. Isolating people and condemning them because they cant escape a trap that was designed and built for just this purpose is at best narrow minded (IMO).
tambourine_man 8y ago
“=> Platforms that use AIs often get biased by tiny groups of hyper-active users. ”
untog 8y ago
This is interesting and valuable information, but I can't help but be a little bitter at whistleblowers like this. This algorithm has been going for years, and these people only emerge after the media started highlighting it recently. I wish they'd blown the whistle at the time they were actually creating these algorithms.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  Maybe the implications weren't clear at the time, or maybe the public wasn't willing to take the time to understand a complicated issue until the media became interested in explaining it to them for other reasons.
- Epskampie 8y ago
  Maybe it wasn’t so clear to them at the time they were creating the algorithm. “People are watching a lot of this, they must like it, let’s recommend it.” is quite a logical thought. The harmful effects may only be becoming apparent now. I for one never thought about this before.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Well the thing is that it isn't even clear now that it counts as something to blow a whistle upon. There is literally nothing illegal about what they were doing despite the harping of every legacy player.
J253 8y ago
It’d be a nice “feature” to be able to disable recommendations after watching a video. When a video ends, it just ends. If I want to watch something else, I have to explicitly search for it. I know it’s the exact opposite of a good monitization scheme but it’d be a good step in putting the power back back in the hands of the user or parent of the user.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
redsummer 8y ago
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper... The unintended consequence of creating an addictive popularity algorithm is that people who are predisposed to informational addiction will end up dictating the contents. Or, in English, everything turns to shit.
alkibiades 8y ago
and what about “conspiracies” that end up true? like that the gulf of tonkin was a false flag? or that iraq doesn’t have wmds? (it was considered a conspiracy at the time)
- raverbashing 8y ago
  They're not censoring the video, they're simply not promoting them And they're not going for every conspiracy, mostly flatearth, antivax stuff (hopefully)
  - alkibiades 8y ago
    >>> They're not censoring the video, they're simply not promoting them so assume youd be fine them doing that for say... elizabeth warrens videos but not donald trumps? Because, "hey its not censorship"
zozbot123 8y ago
TL;DR: the Youtube AI overweights heavy viewers (people who have more "engagement" with YT) and thereby ends up naturally promoting the Youtube equivalent of clickbait. YT creators notice, and make their videos more and more like Youtube-bait so that they'll be promoted. A tight feedback loop is created, and hilarity ensues. Pretty much the exact same dynamics as "Elsagate", except optimized to bait adults, not kids.
- rebuilder 8y ago
  It's optimized to bait a subset of adults who are heavy users of YT. I have to wonder how good the results are for Youtube as a business, overall - have they ended up optimizing for a small group of users at the expense of catering to the larger majority?
bjt2n3904 8y ago
A few thoughts on this. Ultimately, whose fault is it that a user watches a "conspiracy" video? The article seems to consider the user base as mindless people with their mouths open to be spoon-fed content. Do the viewers have no agency? In that thread, why is the solution to curtail "conspiracy" videos? What defines a conspiracy theory? I mean, we all seem to agree here about vaccines and moon landing, but what's to stop YouTube from labeling a political party as "conspiracy" and filtering them out of existence? Can't the users choose for themselves, or are they too "stupid" to pick what's best for them? Yes, YouTube is free to filter as they see fit... but if they want a recommendation engine, AND they want to filter out "bad things", it's a very valid question to ask who decides what is bad. I believe it is essential for YouTube to be transparent about what their algorithms are designed to filter out to avoid this scenario from happening. Part of the the solution that no one seems to be talking about is to caution others against passive consumption of media. YouTube et al want users to plug their ears, close their eyes, tilt their heads back, and consume. YouTube can condition their streams to be as "healthy" as they want, for whatever definition of "healthy" YouTube chooses--but there is no way to healthily allow yourself to be fed a diet of things you don't pick, even if it looks good. "Forcing" YouTube to do this will simply result in the lame, ineffective warnings you see at casinos. "Remember! Mindlessly consume responsibly! If you need help, uh... throw away your computer I guess!" This needs to be done on a human level, thinkers to parents, parent to children. Not a legislative level.
- specialist 8y ago
  It's just another form of addiction. Exploited for profit.
frabcus 8y ago
Anyone know anything about the technicality of the change? The Facebook content filtering end of year 2018 report talks about engagement going up the closer to a policy line (any policy - hate speech, nudity etc) content is. And that applies even if you shift the policy line. It says they are going to change the Facebook Newsfeed to downgrade content which is near to a policy line, with a reverse curve to the extra engagement it gets for being close. I hope the YouTube change is going to be similarly fundamental. Really curious what it is and hope it is a good one.
ggggtez 8y ago
> explains why the bot became racist in less than 24 hours Eh, the connection is tenuous. Sure ai becomes biased by the users who use it the most, but then you really still have to stop and all yourself: why is it we are taking about conspiracy videos instead of how people spend millions of hours watching cat videos, or memes? There is a lot to say about the topic, but the answer really boils down to the fact the recommender systems are just good at working with variables it has access to. I don't know of any AI that has access to: "this person murdered someone" as an input. So literally, how should an AI be expected to optimize against that? Manually tweaking the AI based on things in the real world makes sense, I'd just wish the author didn't have have it and mention Tay which is not really the same issue at all. Tay is an instance of deliberate manipulation, but YouTube is a case of wrong incentives.
- buckminster 8y ago
  > Sure ai becomes biased by the users who use it the most There's an easy fix. Exclude the hardcore users (the top 10% say) from your recommendation engine.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    Hmm, regardless of whether that works, that makes me wonder if it would work for the vicious cycle that is "popular things getting more popular because they are already popular". It would probably lead to some interesting delayed feedback effects where things that are nearly popular get recommended, push out the popular, then the displaced stuff gets pushed into the nearly popular zone, etc. Perhaps some popularity + cooldown system would work. Of course, all of this goes against the short-term incentives of maximizing engagement, so there's no way YouTube will ever implement this (even though it would probably greatly improve diversification of content).
    - buckminster 8y ago
      I'm excluding the most active users, not the most popular things, so I think it would behave quite naturally. It just wouldn't have input from the obsessives. I agree it's unlikely to happen though.
sarcasmOrTears 8y ago
If I had youtube or facebook I would make different recommendation engines and let people choose one. This should stop the complaining
- marcodave 8y ago
  it would most likely end up totally meta, with ads for recommendation engines. Would be hilarious to see it happen though.
Jorge1o1 8y ago
The real lesson learned: rather than actually fixing the problems with your algorithm, just manually block stuff out... People do the same thing too with chatbots. If you have a text file with a list of bad words the bot isn’t allowed to say, it’s not really cutting-edge AI is it.
throwawaysea 8y ago
I hope YouTube (and Google as a whole) are applying these changes to all content. If they are specifically altering the behavior for only certain content (e.g. flat earth videos), I think that raises some serious red flags. I don't want YouTube to be the arbiters of what people watch based on their compass, which is going to have an obvious bias. The reality is that almost all online platforms are driven by user behavior. If those user behaviors lead to relationships between videos that drive recommendations, then that should be respected. Who is YouTube to say that's bad? However, if the quality of recommendations is skewed by one group of heavy users (i.e. it is being gamed), they could consider tweaking how much weight is given to such users and apply it across the board. That is, they need to apply such changes not just to 'conspiracy theory' videos but also to things like political videos from the left (and the right), which surely experience the same skew in recommendations from a minority of users. An aside: some comments here seem to say that YouTube should keep this content but 'stop promoting it'. Well not recommending content is in effect the same as censoring it outright. If an order of magnitude fewer users find some content, the net impact is the same.
supergirl 8y ago
> two years ago I found out that many conspiracies were promoted by the AI much more than truth, for instance flat earth videos were promoted ~10x more than round earth ones is that surprising? why would anyone want to see a video about how the earth is round. conspiracy video is much more interesting, even if you don’t believe the conspiracy
didibus 8y ago
Do we even have a word which is the opposite of educating? Most normally agrees that wide spread, accessible, quality education is a key part of having a democratic, free and wealthy society. We've started to see some online platforms doing a sort of reverse education. What is that? It seems the idea itself of education comes from the philosophy of enlightenment. I guess education is always the promotion of ideas and instructions. So in this case, we are seeing that the ideas and instructions that lead to democracy are not being educated properly, and other ideas are being promoted more heavily. So the question is, what ideas and instructions should we educate people on? Should the algorithms be biased on purpose towards those? Should it be ideas of enlightenment emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition? In this way, should education be regulated? Like should society protect itself against improper education? Who defines improper? YouTube is proving itself to be a great educator. Very effective at it, but it seems its teachings have been controversial. They're not the teachings that lead to our free democracy in the first place. Personally, I think we need to protect what we achieved, and we have a duty to control education so that it reflects the ideas and instructions that worked well in the past to get us where we are in terms of democracy, freedom, wealth, human rights, etc. But I also recognise that whoever you give this power too could abuse it. Not an easy problem we're facing.
didibus 8y ago
Seems like the beginning of the AI overlord trope. Where what the AI chooses to do to satisfy the goal you gave it backfires. Like enslaving us for our own good.
throwawaysea 8y ago
Question for those in this thread who want to see 'conspiracy theory' content either not recommended/promoted or censored outright: do you also want the same thing for videos that support your own ideologies? For example if you are a liberal Democrat (as I imagine most of us here are), do you question YouTube's recommendation engine when you click and follow video recommendations towards videos you hit 'Like' on? Aren't hyperactive users skewing recommendations by promoting fringe political views (e.g. socialism) in those instances? To be clear, I don't want to turn this into a debate of left versus right or about what is fringe and what isn't. If there is a problem with the quality of recommendations on YouTube, I believe it exists more broadly and not just with 'conspiracy theory' content. My point therefore is to question whether this recent noise about YouTube recommendations is really about the algorithms or if it is just about the power dynamics between groups of people who have different opinions and want to block ideas they disagree with personally. After all, isn't it just a vocal minority of hyperactive Internet users who are complaining about YouTube's recommendations and fomenting Internet outrage about it in the first place?
CptFribble 8y ago
Fringe conspiracy videos and weird kids cartoon mashups aren't the problem. The problem is this: https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-ai-ed9df072b704 https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-a... Everyone carries a set of basic assumptions about how the human system works, like what's acceptable public behavior, how the government should be run (which affects who you vote for), expectations about how certain people will act, etc. These assumptions are based on the information we take in each day, like articles read, images viewed/scrolled past, and so on. We ARE our media diets, whether we want to admit it or not. Our opinions are formed slowly, they change slowly, and there are several well known "bugs" in human thought patterns that make us tend to prefer an echo chamber and reject information that doesn't line up with held beliefs. AI enables fine-tuned control of exactly what assumptions people gain and maintain. What happens if YouTube silently starts recommending PragerU videos to all the millions of high schoolers that match the "impressionable" profile? What would that do to the basic expectations of the citizenry about what the "right" kind of government and tax system is? What if the platform was used to convince everyone that annual slavery reparations must be made in perpetuity? No one wants to admit that ads work on them, but we all know they work in general. So how much of what you know is true, was fed to you? In a world where everything we consume runs through relatively black-box algorithms (black-box to us outsiders, anyway), how much of our knowledge and beliefs are our own? Guess I'm getting myself down the rabbit hole here. There's no easy answers anywhere. I think it's only a matter of time until we get our own Ozymandias.
- drewmol 8y ago
  >if YouTube silently starts recommending PragerU videos to all the millions of high schoolers that match the "impressionable" profile? As someone who very rarely aligns with any of Dennis Prager's political dogma, that would be so much better than the "Top 10 Reasons The Earth Might Actually Be Flat" type that dominates reccomendations now, albiet less profitable. We should of course expect YouTube to behave in a way that prioratizes the benefits to them financialy, etc. Like you said there's no easy answers anywhere. Understanding that all of YouTube's reccomendations are effectivey silent, programitic , and optimized for profits that get calculated on industry stardard, necessarily shallow engagement metrics like clicks and views is a helpful start but seemingly uncommon knowledge.
emmelaich 8y ago
Positive feedback is bad. All engineers know that. These are Dawkin's memetic viruses being spread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind BTW, why does he post Youtube conspiracy links? He should at least suggest using incognito/private!
warp_factor 8y ago
This post should also make people realize how powerful youtube and tech monopolies became. By changing their recommendation algorithms, they can change the way a whole society thinks! Just look at the recommendation from the blog: "Recommend more round-earth videos". So far, this extreme political power has been used without the platforms managing it, but it would only make sense for all of those platforms to use it in their advantage.
- rexpop 8y ago
  All the more reason to bake user control into the legal-and-technical architecture of systems like this with structures like the Platform Coop. Communities impacted by media platforms need levers of control over them.
- rland 8y ago
  I would like for these centralized platforms decentralized re recommendations. I can picture an API that anyone can use, that would enable third parties to design recommendation algorithms for YouTube. Right now, YouTube is in charge, because they have all of the user data, so you have to go with their algorithm. A sort of "marketplace" for recommendation algos -- some explicitly marketed towards different genres, personality styles, politics, etc. Right now it's just a tremendous black box, although it works well most of the time ime.
golemiprague 8y ago
What if I want to watch conspiracy theories and I want them to be recommended to me? How youtube decides what is conspiracy anyway? and how do they decide that I don't want to watch them?
RileyJames 8y ago
Doesn’t this come back to the capability to think critically and act with self control? The internet is full of bullshit, so is the rest of the world. If you walk down the street and do as every sign, store, person or organisation desires of you, you’re going to run out of time and money before you make it more than a couple of blocks. You will live at the whims of those who are determined to influence you. Why would we ban conspiracy theory videos when we have churches in every town? Some ideas require proof and others dont?
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stebann 8y ago
We are responsible as citizens for pushing the political regulations for the dangerous consequences(AI's effects). It seems that politicians won't do it because they are interested in all this non-sense theories, it makes easy for them to introduce all kind of sneaky ideas that will benefit their agenda. They don't want us to think clearly about the power they have through technology and services being deployed continously. They won't do it at least we coerce them to do it.
hokus 8y ago
I recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU
Proven 8y ago
The less shitty recommendations YT makes, the more users move to other shitty sites with shitty recommendations. That’s why the problem (which doesn’t exist) can’t be fixed that way (and that is also why these philosopher kings tend to be globalists and statists - the only way make make sure no citizen is left behind, regardless of their opinion)
scoutt 8y ago
What about instead of playing a pre-roll ad, they instead start playing some "warning" video saying that some of the videos users will see (not necessarily the video after the ad) will sometimes try to deceive and/or confuse them? Maybe citing some example titles/videos. And of course, the "warning" video doesn't have to be played every time; just occasionally. This might generate some kind of awareness. The AI can work by selecting the right "warning" video for a given audience. Telling this to a 65 y/o is not the same that saying it to a 20 y/o.
firexcy 8y ago
I do find YouTube’s recommendation algorithm prone to low quality contents. Sometimes I click one or two clickbait videos out of curiosity, and as soon as I return to homepage I would find alike videos starting filling my feed. I have to manually unlike them to force the algorithm back to the right track or there will only be more. Now I simply disable YouTube’s watch and search history and almost never care about what’s on the homepage.
prirun 8y ago
"Platforms that use AIs often get biased by tiny groups of hyper-active users." I think nearly everything in life gets biased by tiny groups of hyper-active users. For example, one story about a razor blade in an apple, published on the news for a week, leads many to think trick-or-treating is now a dangerous activity. For me, a key thing is to limit exposure to ALL media. It's ALL biased in one way or another. Learn to trust your actual experience as much or more than what you read and hear from others.

302 points by seapunk 8y ago

Related ( https://twitter.com/math_rachel/status/1094041631211249664 https://twitter.com/math_rachel/status/1094041631211249664 ) Another good example of resisting the tyranny of metrics is Meetup trying to avoid a runaway feedback loop in its recommendation system, as described by @estola https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqoRzNhrTnQ* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqoRzNhrTnQ*

TheLuddite 8y ago

These companies are cancer...the soon we begin bombing them - the better.

paulsutter 8y ago

If it is written in PowerPoint, it's probably AI > "I worked on the AI that promoted them"

softwaredoug 8y ago
Using the term “AI” was also a big red flag that this person doesn’t know how the algorithm works. It’s not some sky net sentient thing trying to get us to watch more videos... it’s math and training data

Andre607 8y ago

Does anyone else find these kinds of Twitter threads incredibly hard to follow? It's very difficult to contextualize and adapt to reading these short incremental bursts of text or 'Twitter threads'. It always feels like important context and exposition is missing. I seem to understand the gist, that Youtube seems to have promoted flat earth videos disproportionately, but the 'whistleblower' aspect is not immediately apparent.

okhuman 8y ago
+1
ericol 8y ago
Couldn't agree more.
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RodericDay 8y ago
I find it incredibly easy to follow. In fact, the thread on Twitter itself is even easier to read than this ThreaderApp link that some people demand. The incessant bloviating from people who refuse to learn how to use Twitter is far more annoying tbh, it's starting to sound like old people complaining about the music being too loud, and it always derails discussion.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  I know how to read Twitter and yeah, this one is really hard to read. It's got all these numbers with slashes behind them scattered throughout. It's got a list of numbers with slashes in the middle. It's got random links. It's got the occasional sentence without punctuation It's just kind of a mess. I was a heavy user of Twitter for multiple years. I've pulled back on it lately and it's really amazing how much I don't miss the weird, telegraphic kind of writing it tends to encourage. It really bugs me that one of our major means of communication forces you to filter everything through tiny text boxes that only recently became big enough for a whole sentence, and strongly discourages taking time to actually consider the flow of an idea through multiple paragraphs.
  - StellarTabi 8y ago
    "This is why I can’t have conversations using Twitter" http://antirez.com/news/82 http://antirez.com/news/82 I can't see how people use Twitter for anything more than shouting into the ether at each other. It's just so messy and rambly if you try.

Laforet 8y ago

Can confirm, I've had flat earth stuff recommended to me after watching normal astronomy/rocketry videos (Vsauce, Scott Manley, etc), notwithstanding the fact I am also subscribed to several skeptic channels. The AI clearly wasn't able to distinguish context beyond a few keywords. This just adds to the general uselessness of the recommendation feature - I've seen that video five times, it's good but could you offer me something else?

williamdclt 8y ago
Honestly, "seen that video five times" sounds like a good heuristic for "this guy might want to watch that video". "I've already seen that video once" would not be. That being said, yeah the recommendation feature is just terrible
- solarkraft 8y ago
  Unfortunately, out of the thousands of videos I've seen and the millions I don't want to see, every once in a while YouTube chooses one and really promotes the fuck out of it. The recommendation engine is awful for me. It doesn't make me want to spend time on YouTube. It's amazing that at the same time it seems to learn how to get people addicted.
whatshisface 8y ago
What if skeptics frequently watch flat earth videos because they enjoy the schadenfreude?
- jstanley 8y ago
  I personally do this and have been occasionally annoyed that I can't find a particular flat earth video because all the results for it are about people debunking it, even if I get super specific with the search terms. I think YouTube have gone too far the other way.
  - colejohnson66 8y ago

S_A_P 8y ago

I’m becoming more and more frustrated with YouTube, because I have seen it take my stepson and my son and turn them in to bedridden sloths. Ok that was hyperbole but there is a whole new level of friction to get them to do anything around the house or even get out of the car when we arrive somewhere. Of course as their parent I impose boundaries on YouTube time. However I don’t think that YouTube has been a great influence on either of them. It’s a hard problem.

albertgoeswoof 8y ago
Probably not a YouTube problem, I suspect generations before would have said exactly the same thing of TV, Radio and even Books
hi5eyes 8y ago
my cousins kids will watch youtube videos on their phone/tablet while playing games on another phone/tablet or on another monitor screen while playing fortnite/pc games youtube is dangerous; just like netflix and facebook, they're designed to get people to stay on for as long as possible and obviously children are very susceptible to the design
- dageshi 8y ago
  Is that any different to using a computer with the tv on for background noise? Or computer + podcast/audio book/radio? Seems like this is just an updated version of what people have been doing ever since the computer was invented.
  - mavhc 8y ago
    'Socrates famously warned against writing because it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.” He also advised that children can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, so parents should only allow them to hear wholesome allegories and not “improper” tales, lest their development go astray. ' 'The French statesman Malesherbes railed against the fashion for getting news from the printed page, arguing that it socially isolated readers and detracted from the spiritually uplifting group practice of getting news from the pulpit. A hundred years later, as literacy became essential and schools were widely introduced, the curmudgeons turned against education for being unnatural and a risk to mental health. An 1883 article in the weekly medical journal the Sanitarian argued that schools “exhaust the children’s brains and nervous systems with complex and multiple studies, and ruin their bodies by protracted imprisonment.” Meanwhile, excessive study was considered a leading cause of madness by the medical community.' ' In 1936, the music magazine the Gramophone reported that children had “developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker” and described how the radio programs were disturbing the balance of their excitable minds. '

xfitm3 8y ago

I support YouTube denouncing flat earthers because the science is clear to me: they're wrong. I think this will get slippery if they make similar tweaks for politics or social issues. This raises the question is it really YouTube's job to stop crazy? Where is the responsibility of the viewer?

Spooky23 8y ago
Why is it YouTube’s job to promote crazy? Why does the platform facilitate the branding of ignorance? Blaming the viewer is ridiculous — repetition of propaganda is dangerous and eventually changes people’s minds. It’s unfortunate that an amazing educational and entertainment resource is ruined by dumb policy — I don’t feel it’s appropriate for my son to use YouTube independently, as it always leads you to a rabbit hole of crazy through the recommendation engine. Always, because ignorance is engaging.
jeromegv 8y ago
The problem is not about Youtube stopping or not stopping the crazy. The problem is that: "flat earth videos were promoted ~10x more than round earth ones". They actually promoted the crazy quite a lot more than they promoted the real one. Keep the crazy videos on but jeez, stop promoting them above everything else.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  I think that if people want to watch flat earth videos, then the right thing to do is connect them to flat earth videos. I for one think flat earth videos are hilarious.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    Yeah, this is part of the problem. Finding them "funny" and feeding the promotion machine. This is how we get teenagers having to vaccinate themselves because their parents were too stupid to fall for the antivax BS Because as inconsequential for everyday life (in general) if man stepped on the moon or if the Earth is a cylinder, it teaches people that "it's ok to ignore those nerds that say otherwise, whatever you believe that's ok" "Let's give stupidity a chance"? Sorry, no

ianai 8y ago

I think I’m more shocked by how willing people are to take fringe ideas seriously on the internet. I had a clear moment when new to the internet where I realized it should be taken with a grain of salt. But apparently many people never have that realization or they seemingly choose what they will believe.

general8bitso 8y ago
There are alot of mentally ill people in the US that can freely interact online. I am not sure of the solution, at all.
jeromegv 8y ago
I've seen it in the family. There seems to be a mentality among people from an older generation to think that if its published somewhere, then it must be true or close to be true. All their life, they were exposed to newspapers, magazines. Suddenly their habit changed and now they were getting news from the newspaper on the internet. But it was always true or close to be true, nothing was entirely made up. And then one day, they started getting news from friends on Whatsapp. Links from Youtube shared to them. There was never any change, it's still the internet giving them news. It never occurred to them that some what they were watching was entirely made up. I remember my wife's mom telling us that Steve Jobs launched the iPad on Dragons Den. Had no idea what she was talking about and then she showed us a doctored video of Steve Jobs at Dragons Dens, showing the iPad to everyone. She thought it was true. And we told her it was made up. And she couldn't understand why someone would spend time creating something false on the internet. She just couldn't understand it.
- Krasnol 8y ago
  The really weird thing about this is, that the same people had a few years ago been talking "the internet" down a few years ago. Now the same people believe all kinds of crap from "the internet". I wonder if it may be our fault somehow by telling them that not everything on the internet is crap.
- planktonite 8y ago
  > old people seem to believe things just because they are published Yeah, the dumb ones do. That’s not because of the generation they grew up in, it’s because there are dumb people in every generation. There are just as many people in the newest generations who believe anything that comes from the mouth of an authority figure.

KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago

Yikes, while I understand there is some harm done by the AI leading people down "rabbit holes" I'd still rather have the AI stay independent than have humans manually biasing the results. The results of the AI reveals the worst instincts of humans but a manually tuned AI can be turned into a weapon for propaganda. That would be a worse result in every way. A naturally conspiracy theorist AI can be escaped and controlled on a per-person level by simply being a logically thinking person and controlling your feed and likes while a propaganda machine that serves a political purpose cannot. That really sucks.

jeromegv 8y ago
Someone coded the AI, the AI is biased by default. There is no such thing as an "independent" AI.
- s_m_t 8y ago
  The danger is when the state or a political party or some other organizarion with the states levers of power controls the algorithm. It won't be flat earth videos that get deranked it will be anything that contradicts selling us trash and invading other countries. That warship wasn't actually bombed by the enemy, they probably didn't use those chemical weapons, why is our state department funding the same terrorists we were just fighting yesterday, actually those moderate rebels aren't so moderate will become the new flat earth.
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
  That's not necessarily the case, the current trendy deep learning model has mostly black box AIs that are not manually tuned.
  - oliveshell 8y ago
    Here, however, it explicitly is the case. From the linked article: > “We designed YT’s AI to increase the time people spend online, because it leads to more ads.”

whiddershins 8y ago

We’ve all completely lost perspective. The engine wants people to spend as much time as possible on YouTube. Netflix’s wants the same, even though it’s not even ad based! Facebook wants the same. As infinitum. This is just addiction peddling. Nothing more. I think we have no idea how much damage this is doing to us. It’s as if someone invented cocaine for the first time and we have no social norms or legal framework to confront it. One thing you can never get back is time. It runs one way and as of this writing, we all have a finite amount of it. Conspiracy videos are the least of the problem.

malvosenior 8y ago
Prior to YouTube, the internet and recommendation engines I used to spend hours in front of the TV. I could do this for days on end. I don't think I was alone. Now I spend the same amount of time in front of my computer only the content is 1,000X more informative and valuable (seriously, you don't want to know how many reruns of Facts of Life and Charles In Charge I've seen). Recommendations are simply a service that makes my life easier and potentially gives me something cool to watch (they don't usually work that good, but that's not the argument here).
- ggggtez 8y ago
  I think it's an interesting comment. I wonder if the average person spends less time watching reruns compared to the 70s/80s/90s. There certainly was a cultural push to not be a "couch potato", and I wonder if we'll see that again with internet entertainment.
- deleted 8y ago
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- oriolid 8y ago
  Interesting. I used to have Netflix and discover some interesting Youtube content from related videos, but now Netflix only recommends me Marvel films I don't want to watch and removes all interesting content and Youtube has terrible crap in "recommended for you" videos. On plus side, learning to play guitar has been at least as satisfying.

mbell 8y ago

> => Platforms that use AIs often get biased by tiny groups of hyper-active users. I don't doubt this but it's unclear to me how this is much different this is than many other systems. I think there are a _lot_ of systems that have an operating point defined by a small group of hyperactive users. e.g. The vast majority of twitter / reddit / probably even hacker news content is created by a tiny % of users. Even if you move past the content creation phase, curation is often also controlled by a small group of hyperactive users. e.g. The relatively small number of people that switch to the 'New' view on HN or reddit whom collectively decide what gets moved onto the front page where the masses will see it. It seems to me that an AI approach could be more 'fair' or 'democratic' in comparison to many of these existing systems in that it should consider the patterns of all users in some way, vs just relying on a small self selecting group to perform the same function. To wrap back to this YouTube situation, I think the deeper question here is why we seem to have so many people willing to believe anything they see on YouTube? More concerning I guess is the general idea that if we hide the offending content that is a 'solution'. It's really just putting a bandaid on a deeper problem and hoping it goes away.

nraynaud 8y ago

I watch a lot of YouTube, many university level courses that I absolutely do not understand, I hope to become an influential whale for education.

DisruptiveDave 8y ago

> There are 2 ways to fix vicious circles like with "flat earth" 1) make people spend more time on round earth videos 2) change the AI There's a 3rd. It's complex, difficult (to execute and prove), and hardly ever pushed. Put the onus on individuals to be realistic, honest, self aware, and diligent. Sure, it's not easy, not clean, and will likely lose more than it wins in the short term. But ignoring it completely is just...dangerous. Continuing to ask Daddy to change the world for you breeds less-than-desirable attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions. This concerns me more than any Internet video does.

wtracy 8y ago
First, a lot of the people watching these videos are high-functioning schizophrenics. Asking them to be more self-aware and diligent is like asking a paraplegic to spend more time walking. Second, how do you plan to do this? Put a banner on every Youtube page that says, "Don't trust this video"? What we're doing now clearly isn't working, and I don't know what you propose to do that we aren't already doing.
ilovetux 8y ago
I would say that your suggestion is the way things currently are. Isolating people and condemning them because they cant escape a trap that was designed and built for just this purpose is at best narrow minded (IMO).

tambourine_man 8y ago

“=> Platforms that use AIs often get biased by tiny groups of hyper-active users. ”

untog 8y ago

This is interesting and valuable information, but I can't help but be a little bitter at whistleblowers like this. This algorithm has been going for years, and these people only emerge after the media started highlighting it recently. I wish they'd blown the whistle at the time they were actually creating these algorithms.

whatshisface 8y ago
Maybe the implications weren't clear at the time, or maybe the public wasn't willing to take the time to understand a complicated issue until the media became interested in explaining it to them for other reasons.
Epskampie 8y ago
Maybe it wasn’t so clear to them at the time they were creating the algorithm. “People are watching a lot of this, they must like it, let’s recommend it.” is quite a logical thought. The harmful effects may only be becoming apparent now. I for one never thought about this before.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Well the thing is that it isn't even clear now that it counts as something to blow a whistle upon. There is literally nothing illegal about what they were doing despite the harping of every legacy player.

J253 8y ago

It’d be a nice “feature” to be able to disable recommendations after watching a video. When a video ends, it just ends. If I want to watch something else, I have to explicitly search for it. I know it’s the exact opposite of a good monitization scheme but it’d be a good step in putting the power back back in the hands of the user or parent of the user.

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redsummer 8y ago

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper... The unintended consequence of creating an addictive popularity algorithm is that people who are predisposed to informational addiction will end up dictating the contents. Or, in English, everything turns to shit.

alkibiades 8y ago

and what about “conspiracies” that end up true? like that the gulf of tonkin was a false flag? or that iraq doesn’t have wmds? (it was considered a conspiracy at the time)

raverbashing 8y ago
They're not censoring the video, they're simply not promoting them And they're not going for every conspiracy, mostly flatearth, antivax stuff (hopefully)
- alkibiades 8y ago
  >>> They're not censoring the video, they're simply not promoting them so assume youd be fine them doing that for say... elizabeth warrens videos but not donald trumps? Because, "hey its not censorship"

zozbot123 8y ago

TL;DR: the Youtube AI overweights heavy viewers (people who have more "engagement" with YT) and thereby ends up naturally promoting the Youtube equivalent of clickbait. YT creators notice, and make their videos more and more like Youtube-bait so that they'll be promoted. A tight feedback loop is created, and hilarity ensues. Pretty much the exact same dynamics as "Elsagate", except optimized to bait adults, not kids.

rebuilder 8y ago
It's optimized to bait a subset of adults who are heavy users of YT. I have to wonder how good the results are for Youtube as a business, overall - have they ended up optimizing for a small group of users at the expense of catering to the larger majority?

bjt2n3904 8y ago

A few thoughts on this. Ultimately, whose fault is it that a user watches a "conspiracy" video? The article seems to consider the user base as mindless people with their mouths open to be spoon-fed content. Do the viewers have no agency? In that thread, why is the solution to curtail "conspiracy" videos? What defines a conspiracy theory? I mean, we all seem to agree here about vaccines and moon landing, but what's to stop YouTube from labeling a political party as "conspiracy" and filtering them out of existence? Can't the users choose for themselves, or are they too "stupid" to pick what's best for them? Yes, YouTube is free to filter as they see fit... but if they want a recommendation engine, AND they want to filter out "bad things", it's a very valid question to ask who decides what is bad. I believe it is essential for YouTube to be transparent about what their algorithms are designed to filter out to avoid this scenario from happening. Part of the the solution that no one seems to be talking about is to caution others against passive consumption of media. YouTube et al want users to plug their ears, close their eyes, tilt their heads back, and consume. YouTube can condition their streams to be as "healthy" as they want, for whatever definition of "healthy" YouTube chooses--but there is no way to healthily allow yourself to be fed a diet of things you don't pick, even if it looks good. "Forcing" YouTube to do this will simply result in the lame, ineffective warnings you see at casinos. "Remember! Mindlessly consume responsibly! If you need help, uh... throw away your computer I guess!" This needs to be done on a human level, thinkers to parents, parent to children. Not a legislative level.

specialist 8y ago
It's just another form of addiction. Exploited for profit.

frabcus 8y ago

Anyone know anything about the technicality of the change? The Facebook content filtering end of year 2018 report talks about engagement going up the closer to a policy line (any policy - hate speech, nudity etc) content is. And that applies even if you shift the policy line. It says they are going to change the Facebook Newsfeed to downgrade content which is near to a policy line, with a reverse curve to the extra engagement it gets for being close. I hope the YouTube change is going to be similarly fundamental. Really curious what it is and hope it is a good one.

ggggtez 8y ago

> explains why the bot became racist in less than 24 hours Eh, the connection is tenuous. Sure ai becomes biased by the users who use it the most, but then you really still have to stop and all yourself: why is it we are taking about conspiracy videos instead of how people spend millions of hours watching cat videos, or memes? There is a lot to say about the topic, but the answer really boils down to the fact the recommender systems are just good at working with variables it has access to. I don't know of any AI that has access to: "this person murdered someone" as an input. So literally, how should an AI be expected to optimize against that? Manually tweaking the AI based on things in the real world makes sense, I'd just wish the author didn't have have it and mention Tay which is not really the same issue at all. Tay is an instance of deliberate manipulation, but YouTube is a case of wrong incentives.

buckminster 8y ago
> Sure ai becomes biased by the users who use it the most There's an easy fix. Exclude the hardcore users (the top 10% say) from your recommendation engine.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  Hmm, regardless of whether that works, that makes me wonder if it would work for the vicious cycle that is "popular things getting more popular because they are already popular". It would probably lead to some interesting delayed feedback effects where things that are nearly popular get recommended, push out the popular, then the displaced stuff gets pushed into the nearly popular zone, etc. Perhaps some popularity + cooldown system would work. Of course, all of this goes against the short-term incentives of maximizing engagement, so there's no way YouTube will ever implement this (even though it would probably greatly improve diversification of content).
  - buckminster 8y ago
    I'm excluding the most active users, not the most popular things, so I think it would behave quite naturally. It just wouldn't have input from the obsessives. I agree it's unlikely to happen though.

sarcasmOrTears 8y ago

If I had youtube or facebook I would make different recommendation engines and let people choose one. This should stop the complaining

marcodave 8y ago
it would most likely end up totally meta, with ads for recommendation engines. Would be hilarious to see it happen though.

Jorge1o1 8y ago

The real lesson learned: rather than actually fixing the problems with your algorithm, just manually block stuff out... People do the same thing too with chatbots. If you have a text file with a list of bad words the bot isn’t allowed to say, it’s not really cutting-edge AI is it.

throwawaysea 8y ago

I hope YouTube (and Google as a whole) are applying these changes to all content. If they are specifically altering the behavior for only certain content (e.g. flat earth videos), I think that raises some serious red flags. I don't want YouTube to be the arbiters of what people watch based on their compass, which is going to have an obvious bias. The reality is that almost all online platforms are driven by user behavior. If those user behaviors lead to relationships between videos that drive recommendations, then that should be respected. Who is YouTube to say that's bad? However, if the quality of recommendations is skewed by one group of heavy users (i.e. it is being gamed), they could consider tweaking how much weight is given to such users and apply it across the board. That is, they need to apply such changes not just to 'conspiracy theory' videos but also to things like political videos from the left (and the right), which surely experience the same skew in recommendations from a minority of users. An aside: some comments here seem to say that YouTube should keep this content but 'stop promoting it'. Well not recommending content is in effect the same as censoring it outright. If an order of magnitude fewer users find some content, the net impact is the same.

supergirl 8y ago

> two years ago I found out that many conspiracies were promoted by the AI much more than truth, for instance flat earth videos were promoted ~10x more than round earth ones is that surprising? why would anyone want to see a video about how the earth is round. conspiracy video is much more interesting, even if you don’t believe the conspiracy

didibus 8y ago

Do we even have a word which is the opposite of educating? Most normally agrees that wide spread, accessible, quality education is a key part of having a democratic, free and wealthy society. We've started to see some online platforms doing a sort of reverse education. What is that? It seems the idea itself of education comes from the philosophy of enlightenment. I guess education is always the promotion of ideas and instructions. So in this case, we are seeing that the ideas and instructions that lead to democracy are not being educated properly, and other ideas are being promoted more heavily. So the question is, what ideas and instructions should we educate people on? Should the algorithms be biased on purpose towards those? Should it be ideas of enlightenment emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition? In this way, should education be regulated? Like should society protect itself against improper education? Who defines improper? YouTube is proving itself to be a great educator. Very effective at it, but it seems its teachings have been controversial. They're not the teachings that lead to our free democracy in the first place. Personally, I think we need to protect what we achieved, and we have a duty to control education so that it reflects the ideas and instructions that worked well in the past to get us where we are in terms of democracy, freedom, wealth, human rights, etc. But I also recognise that whoever you give this power too could abuse it. Not an easy problem we're facing.

didibus 8y ago

Seems like the beginning of the AI overlord trope. Where what the AI chooses to do to satisfy the goal you gave it backfires. Like enslaving us for our own good.

throwawaysea 8y ago

Question for those in this thread who want to see 'conspiracy theory' content either not recommended/promoted or censored outright: do you also want the same thing for videos that support your own ideologies? For example if you are a liberal Democrat (as I imagine most of us here are), do you question YouTube's recommendation engine when you click and follow video recommendations towards videos you hit 'Like' on? Aren't hyperactive users skewing recommendations by promoting fringe political views (e.g. socialism) in those instances? To be clear, I don't want to turn this into a debate of left versus right or about what is fringe and what isn't. If there is a problem with the quality of recommendations on YouTube, I believe it exists more broadly and not just with 'conspiracy theory' content. My point therefore is to question whether this recent noise about YouTube recommendations is really about the algorithms or if it is just about the power dynamics between groups of people who have different opinions and want to block ideas they disagree with personally. After all, isn't it just a vocal minority of hyperactive Internet users who are complaining about YouTube's recommendations and fomenting Internet outrage about it in the first place?

CptFribble 8y ago

Fringe conspiracy videos and weird kids cartoon mashups aren't the problem. The problem is this: https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-ai-ed9df072b704 https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-a... Everyone carries a set of basic assumptions about how the human system works, like what's acceptable public behavior, how the government should be run (which affects who you vote for), expectations about how certain people will act, etc. These assumptions are based on the information we take in each day, like articles read, images viewed/scrolled past, and so on. We ARE our media diets, whether we want to admit it or not. Our opinions are formed slowly, they change slowly, and there are several well known "bugs" in human thought patterns that make us tend to prefer an echo chamber and reject information that doesn't line up with held beliefs. AI enables fine-tuned control of exactly what assumptions people gain and maintain. What happens if YouTube silently starts recommending PragerU videos to all the millions of high schoolers that match the "impressionable" profile? What would that do to the basic expectations of the citizenry about what the "right" kind of government and tax system is? What if the platform was used to convince everyone that annual slavery reparations must be made in perpetuity? No one wants to admit that ads work on them, but we all know they work in general. So how much of what you know is true, was fed to you? In a world where everything we consume runs through relatively black-box algorithms (black-box to us outsiders, anyway), how much of our knowledge and beliefs are our own? Guess I'm getting myself down the rabbit hole here. There's no easy answers anywhere. I think it's only a matter of time until we get our own Ozymandias.

drewmol 8y ago
>if YouTube silently starts recommending PragerU videos to all the millions of high schoolers that match the "impressionable" profile? As someone who very rarely aligns with any of Dennis Prager's political dogma, that would be so much better than the "Top 10 Reasons The Earth Might Actually Be Flat" type that dominates reccomendations now, albiet less profitable. We should of course expect YouTube to behave in a way that prioratizes the benefits to them financialy, etc. Like you said there's no easy answers anywhere. Understanding that all of YouTube's reccomendations are effectivey silent, programitic , and optimized for profits that get calculated on industry stardard, necessarily shallow engagement metrics like clicks and views is a helpful start but seemingly uncommon knowledge.

emmelaich 8y ago

Positive feedback is bad. All engineers know that. These are Dawkin's memetic viruses being spread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind BTW, why does he post Youtube conspiracy links? He should at least suggest using incognito/private!

warp_factor 8y ago

This post should also make people realize how powerful youtube and tech monopolies became. By changing their recommendation algorithms, they can change the way a whole society thinks! Just look at the recommendation from the blog: "Recommend more round-earth videos". So far, this extreme political power has been used without the platforms managing it, but it would only make sense for all of those platforms to use it in their advantage.

rexpop 8y ago
All the more reason to bake user control into the legal-and-technical architecture of systems like this with structures like the Platform Coop. Communities impacted by media platforms need levers of control over them.
rland 8y ago
I would like for these centralized platforms decentralized re recommendations. I can picture an API that anyone can use, that would enable third parties to design recommendation algorithms for YouTube. Right now, YouTube is in charge, because they have all of the user data, so you have to go with their algorithm. A sort of "marketplace" for recommendation algos -- some explicitly marketed towards different genres, personality styles, politics, etc. Right now it's just a tremendous black box, although it works well most of the time ime.

golemiprague 8y ago

What if I want to watch conspiracy theories and I want them to be recommended to me? How youtube decides what is conspiracy anyway? and how do they decide that I don't want to watch them?

RileyJames 8y ago

Doesn’t this come back to the capability to think critically and act with self control? The internet is full of bullshit, so is the rest of the world. If you walk down the street and do as every sign, store, person or organisation desires of you, you’re going to run out of time and money before you make it more than a couple of blocks. You will live at the whims of those who are determined to influence you. Why would we ban conspiracy theory videos when we have churches in every town? Some ideas require proof and others dont?

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stebann 8y ago

We are responsible as citizens for pushing the political regulations for the dangerous consequences(AI's effects). It seems that politicians won't do it because they are interested in all this non-sense theories, it makes easy for them to introduce all kind of sneaky ideas that will benefit their agenda. They don't want us to think clearly about the power they have through technology and services being deployed continously. They won't do it at least we coerce them to do it.

hokus 8y ago

I recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU

Proven 8y ago

The less shitty recommendations YT makes, the more users move to other shitty sites with shitty recommendations. That’s why the problem (which doesn’t exist) can’t be fixed that way (and that is also why these philosopher kings tend to be globalists and statists - the only way make make sure no citizen is left behind, regardless of their opinion)

scoutt 8y ago

What about instead of playing a pre-roll ad, they instead start playing some "warning" video saying that some of the videos users will see (not necessarily the video after the ad) will sometimes try to deceive and/or confuse them? Maybe citing some example titles/videos. And of course, the "warning" video doesn't have to be played every time; just occasionally. This might generate some kind of awareness. The AI can work by selecting the right "warning" video for a given audience. Telling this to a 65 y/o is not the same that saying it to a 20 y/o.

firexcy 8y ago

I do find YouTube’s recommendation algorithm prone to low quality contents. Sometimes I click one or two clickbait videos out of curiosity, and as soon as I return to homepage I would find alike videos starting filling my feed. I have to manually unlike them to force the algorithm back to the right track or there will only be more. Now I simply disable YouTube’s watch and search history and almost never care about what’s on the homepage.

prirun 8y ago

"Platforms that use AIs often get biased by tiny groups of hyper-active users." I think nearly everything in life gets biased by tiny groups of hyper-active users. For example, one story about a razor blade in an apple, published on the news for a week, leads many to think trick-or-treating is now a dangerous activity. For me, a key thing is to limit exposure to ALL media. It's ALL biased in one way or another. Learn to trust your actual experience as much or more than what you read and hear from others.