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TheirTube – How do the recommended videos look on their Youtube home page?
- skim_milk 6y agoCool idea, I've always wanted to do this but instead of using political lines, I've always wanted to know what the recommendations of the peoples of Indian reservations, the black belt, other ethnic enclaves in and outside of America etc. This app seems to exist more for social media activism than for building insight into the lives of different peoples (which is absolutely okay and needs to be said, but still). Are there other websites like this out there?
- 082349872349872 6y agoTry to push your youtube bubble around. It takes days to weeks. Unfortunately you'll need to already know a number of entry searches to "seed" the movement. After that you can try to just move around by surfing from the seeds. I think it's easier if your target bubble uses a different script, or at least a different language.
- tbodt 6y agoIt might help to clear your watch history and subscribers list to get a bit of a fresh start.
- skim_milk 6y agoI was thinking of building a website that simply asks people permission to share a snapshot of their YouTube or other social media recommendations to keep the feed authentic. It would seem to be easy enough to collect and categorize different people's feeds, if I could somehow convince the right people to open up that part of their lives.
- ideals 6y agoFlat Earther is not one of the options available from what I can tell. I suppose it falls under conspiracist although that is a pretty broad category. Fruitarian, Prepper, Liberal, Conservative, Conspiracist, Climate Denier The web design is really good! And it's funded by Mozilla which is cool
- TulliusCicero 6y agoSome of the prepper videos actually look kinda cool. Lots of DIY stuff.
- RIMR 6y agoPreppers are just paranoid DIYers.
- eggsnbacon1 6y agolol so true
- ballenf 6y agoCivilization short-selling + DIY.
- drewcoo 6y agopredicting problems + planning prevention = preparedness Preppers seem paranoid because mental health is a normative social function and they're on an edge of the spectrum.
- tantalor 6y ago> normative social function ?
- chordalkeyboard 6y agonot the person you replied to but they probably mean that mental health is defined by a range of acceptable behaviors and they are close to the edge of the range.
- rhacker 6y agoI would have thought that no one would use the word paranoid to describe a prepper after that many deaths, but here we are.
- api 6y agoI wish there was a way to turn the recommendation algorithms to their inverse setting. Watch a right wing video? Get recommended something from the left. Watch a debunking video? Get recommendations on topics in the paranormal and the fringe. This strikes me more as actual "red pilling."
- IAmEveryone 6y agoThere really is no “other side” to many of these. You won’t find a community of lunatics making 340min-videos about “round earth”, except maybe NASA. And the opposite of a far-right racist isn’t a far-left anything, but a regular person that just happens not to be racist.
- michaelbuckbee 6y agoYeah that's the issue with "do your own research" that's often brought out by the QAnon groups, etc. except I don't know how you possibly deal with one side having pages of pages saying XYZ politician smells like sulfur and is literal demon. What's that person supposed to do put up a page on their website about not smelling like a demon?
- bickeringyokel 6y agoGreat point, I guess the opposite of a prepper video is just an hour long video about someone showing you their regular pantry with average amounts of food and explaining where they want to go on vacation for the next several years.
- floor2 6y agoIn America today, the concept of "a regular person that just happens not to be racist" is a right-wing stance. The current dominant cultural/political/academic stance would suggest that all people are inherently racist and that living in the US is participating in a racist society. The opposite of a "far-right racist" is seen constantly online and in real life as the "anti-racist" or "racial equity advocate" who, rather than supporting non-racist policies (eg, blind auditions for an orchestra where only the sound of playing is heard) they support actively "anti-racist" policies (eg, specifically including race as a consideration for who to include in an orchestra, to achieve a racially diverse outcome from auditions). Of course, just drawing these lines is itself politically challenging. The far-left anti-racist is likely to believe that anyone saying they're not a racist is just in denial or lying. The non-racist might see contemporary policies to treat people differently on the basis of race as itself racist rather than anti-racist.
- ZinniaZirconium 6y agoThis is why I browse incognito, clear my cookies, use a VPN, and don't participate in the phenomenon of recommended content. I don't want some algorithm telling me what I should want.
- aerovistae 6y agoSo you don't have an account on any website?
- ziddoap 6y agoNo, they just use a VPN, incognito, clear cookies, etc. as they stated. This isn't an either/or situation.
- spuz 6y agoYou realise that the Hacker News front page is an algorithm that predicts what you should want?
- mongol 6y agoDoes it? Is it personal?
- IAmEveryone 6y agoYes, by self-selection of visitors.
- ZinniaZirconium 6y agoHaha! Hacker News is a notoriety contest. Obscure doesn't make it to the front page.
- dimitrios1 6y agoI never feel like I am in this group, but maybe it's because I frequently search out opinions, views, and beliefs I may not agree with, and add them to my algorithmic considerations.
- johnmaguire2013 6y agoThis is a very cool idea. I'd love to see similar versions for sites like Facebook and Twitter.
- RIMR 6y agoNeat website. Wish we didn't have this dishonest clickbait title though.
- BitwiseFool 6y agoI got tired of all the clickbait and recommendation spam on my YouTube homepage so I made some filters in uBlock Origin. My filters also block out recommended videos on the righthand side of the video you are watching. Here's what it looks like: https://imgur.com/a/uxpQE1J https://imgur.com/a/uxpQE1J If you'd like the same, enter this into your uBlock Filters. https://pastebin.com/PK1hdeEn https://pastebin.com/PK1hdeEn (Feedback and additions Welcome! This is something I hope to share with others to make YouTube a little less insufferable)
- cercatrova 6y agoYou can also use DFTube which can hide the news feed, comments, playlists and so on. You can choose which to hide or show.
- petargyurov 6y agoI did the same thing, even got rid of the "Up Next" section. It helps reduce distraction and keeps me on YouTube less.
- johnsoft 6y agoYou might be interested in Invidious. It's a lightweight youtube frontend that runs in the browser. https://invidio.us/ https://invidio.us/ https://github.com/iv-org/invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious You can host it yourself or use one of the many public installations: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/wiki/Invidious-Instances https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/wiki/Invidious-Instances
- edgarvaldes 6y agoI use a FF addon[0] that redirects YT links to Invidious [0]https://github.com/metiis/invidious-redirect https://github.com/metiis/invidious-redirect
- moralestapia 6y ago>https://invidio.us/ https://invidio.us/ Cease and desist in 3 ... 2 ... 1
- stjo 6y agoClicking on the back arrow lets you check out recommendations for previous dates.
- notwhereyouare 6y agoneat, I missed that when I saw the website earlier
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI checked out the prepper channel and I actually like the videos that were on there. I know the gag here is that these are fringe topics, but this is a fun way to explore other topics.
- SamWhited 6y agoI always like the general DIY stuff, the problem ends up being that if I watch one or two fun "how to can goods for the end of the world" videos or whatever YouTube inevitably starts recommending people talking about how they're going to start a race war and live in their bunker and kill all the immigrants and black people or something horrible along those lines. I used to live in an area with a lot of prepers and this was their prevailing thought. I'm not sure if it's a minority of the community or not, but it's what YouTube likes to recommend anyways.
- jaywalk 6y agoI don't believe you Re: the extremist YouTube recommendations. They remove videos and ban channels for far less.
- SamWhited 6y agoDoes that stop them being recommended in the mean time? I normally just report this sort of thing, but I never go back to specifically see if it gets removed (hopefully it does). It's what always seems to happen. Of course, it could be from something else I'm watching too, is there a way to see why their algorithm recommends particular things? I mean, it's not like it happens every day, right now my feed is entirely full of mountain bike content, which seems to generate much more friendly and welcoming recommendations.
- anonbcpolit2 6y agoI used to live in an area of liberals and all they did was talk about killing white people. I don't know if they are the minority or not. See how ridiculous that is? Preppers !== racists, they're prepping for a specific or any disaster.
- ThomPete 6y agoGreat stuff, bad AI recommendations at least for the climate denier part. (maybe you should change it to climate catastrophism skeptic which would be more precise from the results I see) very few people denies there is a climate I take it :)
- mongol 6y agoThis is very insightful. I have considered another, somewhat related idea: to sample a news / media site, over the course of time. The idea would be to illustrate how news bubble up and down in priority. It would for example be interesting to follow how a somewhat big but also controversial piece of news would be bumped down in priority as other news are added on top. As I understand, the news home pages changes very frequently to attract people to come back soon to see "what is new". This can have the effect that you miss out on something significant because it is already bumped down. In the old days, when news was printed on paper, you would have one front page per day. I have no idea how many front pages there are per day now but probably dozens if not hundreds of variants, where only after some hours the biggest news is no longer the biggest.
- the_duke 6y agoWith all our media resources and technology, it's crazy that there is no easy way to answer questions like "what happened politically in France in the last month?", "what were the economic developments in Africa in the last quarter?" or "what were the biggest battery technology advances in the last year?". With the barrage of news it is very easy to miss a lot, especially if you want to keep up with multiple domains and geographical regions. I would love some hierarchical listing that shows the most important news items for different time periods (week, month, quarter, year), and filterable by domain (eg business, economy, politics, science, technology, ...). One should be able to continuously drill down. Eg start with all news world wide. Then show only Europe, then only eg Sweden, then the economy of Sweden. Same thing with topics. With each entry linking multiple articles from quality sources, across the political spectrum. I would happily pay 25+/month for such an aggregator with the appropriate quality. Which probably would mean hand-curated lists (opening up all sorts of of bias problems, but still). Edit: I wonder if this could be crowd-sourced via a dedicated platform.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mongol 6y agoThe Economist paper edition has a spread with summarized news for the past week. I have been thinking of isolating myself from the news cycle and keeping myself up-to-date with a one week latency, using the Economist's summaries. The problem is, I have not found a suitable replacement for national (in my case Swedish) and also local news. Would also pay for a similar aggregator.
- tlow 6y agoAlthough the generated personas are caricatures by design, this is a great example of persona development and user segment branching. Great website with excellent design that provides a thoughtful exploration of the youtube's online "echo chambers".
- Svip 6y agoI notice the "liberal" link has "leftist" in the URL. Is YouTube so basic, it cannot distinguish the two?
- CravingLogic 6y agoI'd bet that more than 95% of the US population would equate those two terms.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoWe might as well stop using the term liberal, it means so many things to different people now.
- guerrilla 6y agoWe might as well stop using the term logic, it means so many things to different people now. Liberal is well defined in virtually all models of classification used in political science and political philosophy, which a project such as this should probably defer to.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoPeople absolutely do not agree on what "a liberal" would believe in. Hell, to some people, it's nothing more than a slur. Also, the reductive "then we should toss out the word 'logic' then!" kinda comes off as a tantrum, to me. I don't really get the point. Why not focus and possibly disagree with the suggestion that nobody agrees on what "a liberal" means? If you try to switch the argument to your analogy, then you're going to spend more time defending and explaining your (nonsensical) analogy than you would just explaining where you disagree. For example, you'd have to start explaining why you think people disagree about the word "logic", something I've never encountered. Not a very effective strategy.
- guerrilla 6y agoPeople absolutely do not agree on what "logic" is. Just ask people. Hell, to some people, it's nothing more than "I'm right." >I don't really get the point. The point is that it doesn't matter if people in general don't know that the word means, which is why I didn't refer to "people" but classification systems designed by and for people trying to understand political ideologies and orientations. The term "liberal" has definite specific meanings that correspond relatively narrowly. > something I've never encountered. Then you've never asked regular people what logic is or haven't noticed that their answers differ widely and hardly correspond to what philosophers and mathematicians mean. Nevertheless, the laity's ignorance does not dilute the meaning of the term.
- claydavisss 6y agoHN/Reddit folks like to believe that there is a meaningful constituent of flat-earthers for one simple pernicious reason - they want an unassailable punching bag. Maybe people should spend less time looking for a perfect vessel to fill with only righteous rage. "Flat earthers" are not looting your public library. "Flat earthers" are not shaping education policy. You only fantasize that any of this is true so your endless anger can be framed as being moral.
- thomasfromcdnjs 6y agoWhat does everyone think of Shellenbergers apology for climate alarmism? (Apocalypse Never) It showed up in that category.
- JFKKFJ 6y agoIn reference to the A.I. behind YouTube, have you ever found a video about Cuba in the suggested videos, even if you often look for this type of turism reportage?
- michaelbuckbee 6y agoSomething I genuinely do not understand is the relation between conspiracy themed content and left/right politics. Is there a correlation between YT's recommendation algorithm clearly seems to think there is as there are videos that I would describe as more tangentially political than topical on both the Climate Denier and Conspiracist pages.
- OzzyB 6y agoNot to be that guy but: s/there/their The title is "ThereTube" -- today I was that guy...
- dang 6y agoFixed now.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ma2rten 6y agoTheir liberal persona is actually fairly mainstream, probably to the right of the average Bernie Sanders supporter.
- miteyironpaw 6y agoThat's how I feel too although it's the hardest category for me to judge objectively
- arexxbifs 6y agoThe project has ties to the Mozilla Foundation, and the author also works on a project funded by the European Commission. It's either bias blindness, propaganda, a deliberate way to secure funding, or some combination thereof.
- ravenstine 6y agoSeems like, relative to its own system, YouTube has a decent grasp of where I lie on the political axis. (pretty close to the center)
- guscost 6y agoI would be described as a "climate denier" by many people here, but my YouTube recommendations have zero overlap with the fictional recommendations. This is because I do not feel any need to prop up my opinions with endless wacky video propaganda. Look, I'm sure there are plenty of people who get sucked into bubbles of YouTube nonsense, and sadly these recommendations may accurately represent the recommendations for typical users. But just deciding that someone is a "liberal" or a "conspiracy theorist" does not in fact mean that you can assume anything about what they are seeing on YouTube, which is what the title seems to claim. Please keep that in mind.
- Trowter 6y agowell, obviously Youtube isn't going to read your mind and figure out you're a climate denier. It's going to recommend your videos based on previous viewing, this is a preview of what people who view these types of videos will see. I would have thought anyone on this site could discern that but you're self-proclaimed climate denier so I guess you did your best :)
- sbuttgereit 6y agoI actually find the exercise on this TheirTube thing to be utterly useless. It has a real world validity on par with lie detectors and homeopathy. A person, or group of people, set up this site and built YouTube profiles on what they think people in these categories are like. Then they use those profiles to show "what these people see". The problem is few actual, real individuals match these caricatures. The people that built this site aren't "them", except within a limited one of the presented profiles or two. My only hope is that nobody tries to build an argument around the outcomes of this exercise. I think if anything is to be learned, it's the biases and preconceptions of the people that built the site moreso than anything about how YouTube builds recommendations... re-enforcing or otherwise (and I'm no fan of YouTube recommendations, either). Esse quam videri
- mikael-gramont 6y agoThat's not what they did though. "Each of these TheirTube personas is informed by interviews with real YouTube users who experienced similar recommendation bubbles" "These accounts subscribe to the channels that the interviewees followed, and watches videos from these channels to reproduce a similar viewing history and a recommendation bubble"
- GaryNumanVevo 6y agoI setup an RSS / ytdownloader script a year or two back for my subscriptions. It just mirrors the latest videos to my private CDN overnight, and sends me an email first thing in the morning with a digest. Much nicer way to watch YouTube
- mttjj 6y agoYikes, the name of the website is right there. How did this post title get so screwed up. @dang can you fix the "There" in the title?
- jonny_eh 6y agoSeems to have been fixed.
- rootsudo 6y agoIt's really sad how youtube is becoming a selective news service where it's always doom and gloom and impending fear and anxieties. That's why I just use it for music.
- techntoke 6y agoI like the idea of PipeWire where you can create your own feed without logging in. If I like someone I will send them a donation directly. I don't want want them to be telling me to like and subscribe every 5 seconds and then telling me what products to by because they are secretly sponsored by them.
- jeffbee 6y agoWhat is the YouTube homepage even for? Why does anyone ever see it?
- techntoke 6y agoThis is a great question and something I've often wondered. Most of what I see after deleting recommendations, likes/dislikes, and subscriptions is just click bait. If I put something on that is educational for my kids, next thing I know it is recommending vile content to them. Where do those suggestions and recommendations actually come from?
- hombre_fatal 6y agoSame reason you see Netflix's homepage. When logged in, Youtube.com shows you a mix of new videos from creators you watch and related/recommended videos in the effort to provide you something you will probably want to watch. So I go there when I'm in the mood to watch something, perhaps while eating dinner. And it works. If you want to see how ineffective it would be just looking at a list of popular videos, view the horror that is the trending tab. https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending
- jeffbee 6y agoI guess I just don't ever use YouTube that way. People embed videos in their blogs or on Twitter, and that's where I see them.
- gundmc 6y agoPreviously discussed 13 days ago - 160 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859548
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lanius 6y agoDespite how drastically different the recommendations are for each persona, there seem to be some videos which are inexplicably nearly universally recommended. It's practically a meme - the top comment on many older videos is something along the lines of "See you all again in 5 years when Youtube decides to recommend this again" or "I didn't search for this. Neither did you."
- IronWolve 6y agoI was watching some motorcycle videos overseas, and of course liked (button click) them. This then had my entire channel filled with languages i dont understand. The fix is to remove all liked videos, problem, I had over 15,000 liked videos over decades(s?) of use. I finally found a howto, a script to run in chrome to remove all my likes. Also I have an addon that lets me put channels into categories, addon called PocketTube. It lets me see unfiltered access to my channel choices, and youtube hates its direct access and if I open a video in a new tab, it prompts me for a captcha. I've ended up watching youtube in a VM with a VPN so I can change locations due to youtube's heavy handed behavior. I also will just copy the URL and watch on my desktop. Really, youtube content is vast and un-navigable, they filter results, show in the wrong default order, wont remember settings of order, removed language choice filter. The 80/20 rule, or top 10%, Pareto principle, whatever you want to call the cream on the top problem. The problem is small popular percentage of content. Youtube is pushing popular videos, and you miss out on all the lower popular videos, hiding 80% of the content, many new creators go unnoticed and unviewed. There is a demand for a front end portal, that runs unfiltered but allows search controls, skip popular, view ascending order of all content, view by category only, be able to exclude content, exact search phrase allow, no shadow banned or hidden content rules, no white list rules (by default). I cant be the only one tired of facebook/google/twitter showing me what they think I want, i didnt ask them to be my parser of content, just because I use their service, as its the only game in town, I still dont want spoon fed content. Same problem with podcasts, a search function vs a browse directory. There are so many podcasts, and most places give you the top 10 podcasts per search. I think a unfiltered directory of content providers (any platform), tired with advertising, crowd funding, etc would re-open the internet of new content, and take back the controlling behavior of mega corps.
- sjg007 6y agoGreat idea, someone should do this for FB too.